I'd run VMs more often if I weren't in a constant disk space crunch, even with a 512GB SSD. VMs not only take up space for the OS, they have the annoying property that free space in the virtual disk still takes up space on the real disk once initially dirtied. Especially annoying since in theory, TRIM/discard should be exactly what's needed for the virtual OS to inform the VM software what parts of the virtual disk file it can throw away... yet as far as I can tell, VMware Fusion doesn't support this at all, and VirtualBox only with a hidden, possibly-broken flag.
In fact, I've been looking into NixOS partly because in theory I should be able to wipe the entire system partition whenever I haven't used it for a while, then regenerate it from a handful of config files. Neat - but NixOS partly "compensates" for this by being rather disk hungry when it is in use.
I suppose I should be more diligent about cleaning out junk in general. But these days at least, half the time I have more free RAM than free disk. My next laptop will have 1TB, even with Apple's ransom-level pricing for disk upgrades.
"I'd run VMs more often if I weren't in a constant disk space crunch, even with a 512GB SSD
"I suppose I should be more diligent about cleaning out junk in general."*
You and me both. I generally "reclaim" space when I do a clean install during OS upgrades. Looking at mine, the three biggest chunks are music, videos, and email, most of which I could get away without if I were satisfied with relying on an internet connection.
What do you find takes up the most space on your system?
A variety of things; taking inventory now, the biggest chunks include:
80GB - Boot Camp partition I almost never use but is too useful to get rid of
48GB - /usr/src (hmm, I can probably cut this down, but it includes >700 source trees and I don't remember which of them I care about); biggest individual offenders are:
-> 2.5GB - linux source tree
-> 15GB - chromium source tree
25GB - /Applications
20GB - ~/Music
20GB - anime
20GB - Windows VM (XP!)
9GB - /usr/local, mostly Homebrew
8GB - ~/Pictures, and that's with the Photos app's option to only store thumbnails and stick the rest in iCloud. (Though the preference says: "Originals will also be stored on this Mac if you have enough storage space." Annoying that this isn't more customizable.)
Is there any option to store the source trees in a compressed filesystem? It won't help with the .git directory but on my ZFS NAS I get a 20% saving on that kind of content.
