MacOS : How to Clean up the disk

In my plan to shift to Linux, I considered dual booting.

Turns out I may not have enough disk space.

I have reached at about 12 15GB free space. At first I thought, if live session can fit into 4GB, then 12 15GB should be enough, but looks like that may not be the case. ¹

So I’m shelving the plan to dual boot.

I’ll go with full disk install. That way linux gets entire 128GB SSD 👍

When I started, I had only 5GB space.

So I started finding solutions

This answer from 10 years ago is still valid.

Clear the caches.

I did not realize how much space it takes.

There are caches for the apps that I tried and eventually uninstalled.

The space used by .app was freed (hopefully 😆) but the cache remained.

~/Library/Caches/Homebrew took the most space.

brew autoremove and brew cleanup --prune=30 helped some.

Then there was entire Electron framework inside Ollama.app (Under ~/Library/Caches not actual .app)

Other command that helped : sudo du -hd 1

Bt rather than running it at / , I executed it manually inside specific folders like ~/Library/Caches and ~/Downloads etc.

In all, I learnt a lot and reclaimed about 10GB of disk space.

Not bad for an hour spent searching plus cleaning up.