I have a Dell Netbook which came with Ubuntu Linux 8.3 (I think) in 2008. The drive is a SSD 3gb unit and the drive was nearly full when I received it. There was only 758mb free on the drive and I wondered why they would sell a computer with so little free space on it. When the updates was installed the drive was full. Is there a way to retrieve some space on the drive without deleting programs which came with the computer? I have tried ordering a new drive online without getting one, including Dell itself. In Windows you can delete old files which will free up some space and is wondering if the same thing is possible under Linux?

Sidney

Did you try the trim command ?
It might show the garbage files and collected some space .

The reason for space might be simply temp files from browser cache and other temp files. Might be that you downloaded a bunch of stuff.


I'd say the most easy way would be to do a restore to factory. You'd get back all of what you bought. Then just be careful or consider a usb external for apps and files.

As for the space you and dell made that decision when you bought it. SSD's are expensive and it was a trade off between speed and space.