I just discovered a surprising downside of #NixOS: I set up 22.11 in a VM with 15GB disk space running xfce and no(!) additional packages except the defaults from the GUI installer. So it's an OOTB setup.
After not using it for maybe 2 months, I started "sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade" and ran out of disk space. I could not even recover using "nix-collect-garbage --delete-old" (freed 4.5GB). 😔
Therefore: NixOS needs WAY more disk space than other distros even for the basic OS + xfce.
@publicvoit running a dev workstation with a half terabyte disk and it gets full at least once a week, which means collecting garbage and doing cargo clean in the projects.
Btw, it is highly recommended to save space by enabling hard links in the nix store (not a default):
https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/blob/main/core/default.nix#L73
And running the optimization once after enabling this setting by doing nix-store --optimise (can take a while). 50-100GB saved right there…
@pimeys @publicvoit ... additionally I have this in the config
```
# off-line deduplication
services.beesd.filesystems = {
root = {
spec = "LABEL=nixos";
hashTableSizeMB = 512;
verbosity = "crit";
extraOptions = [ "--loadavg-target" "2.0" ];
};
};
# Btrfs maintanance
# Without this, the free space is not reclaimed after many deletions.
systemd.services.balanceBtrfsRoot = (balanceBtrfs "/" "daily");
```
