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how much storage space does an immutable Distro need in the long run?
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Simplest put, a fedora immutable usually keeps two images, the one you'll boot into next reboot, and the one you're running. If a rpm-ostree update hasn't been run it'll be the one you're running and the last one. My bazzite (heavier than silverblue I guess) images are ~ 14Gb, you need room for three (the two you're using and room for downloading the next) plus 3% of your hard drive because fedora says so, so 3*14 = 42 + .03 * 240 = 42 + 7.2 = 49.2 =~ 50Gb.
Wait a sec, when I actually do a
sudo du -sh /sysroot/ostree/deploy/fedora/deploy/*I get 14Gb for my previous one and 2.1Gb for my current one, so there's some diff black magic fuckery (ostree chunking) going on, which makes sense because it's not taking that long to download. So 50Gb would be super safe, you might get away with 25 depending on how different the two images are (i.e. how much has been updated), but updating to the next major fedora version (e.g. 42->43) would be iffy.
Upshot is, it shouldn't have filled to 90-something in the first place (maybe before ostree chunking, but even then), but if you end up with a lot of entries in your GRUB they're all taking a notable chunk of space and you'll need to purge some.
my flatpaks and appimages consume a hell of a lot more space than silverblue itself (which is essentially just a 'browser launcher' with an appstore 'out-of-the-box').
(and then there's the data, which uses even more)
You're not wrong, and perhaps a flatpak dependent distro isn't the right choice for a disk constrained system if you need a lot of apps. My personal approach is whack a 1Tb+ SSD into root, but that's me, not OP for whatever reason. I just did some scanning of my system for funsies and learned a bit, then shared.