PSA: Uninstalling the Steam flatpak…

[JAHogan]

If you uninstall the Steam flatpak and then install the .deb in Zorin, you may want to check your syslog to see if it is being spammed by your file indexer with messages like “g_file_equal: assertion 'G_IS_FILE (file1)' failed” or “g_file_has_prefix: assertion 'G_IS_FILE (file)' failed”. (The logs are located in /var/log, you can find the "var" folder in the file browser by selecting "other locations" and then selecting your primary drive.)

Removing the flatpak version of Steam apparently left dozens of broken symlinks on my system. I found this out when I realized my SSD was filling up for no apparent reason. Disk Usage Analyzer revealed the problem to be a 320gb(!) syslog file.

I did the following to fix it. Bear in mind I have been using Linux for a week and a half, this was derived from a combination of Google-fu and ChatGPT and I haven’t even stayed at a Holiday Inn in years. So buyer beware, no warranty implied, payment due on receipt, fear death by water, check the comments below to see if someone has corrected any of this, etc:

1. Verify you have broken symlinks using the following terminal command:

find ~ -xtype l -print.

2. This should print a list of every broken link. Check for entries in folders with "steam" in them. If you find them, they can be removed with:

find ~/.steam -xtype l -delete

(change "~.steam" to whatever your particular folder structure is. There were broken symlinks in several folders for me.)

3. Reset your tracker3 cache so it doesn't keep trying to scan any ghost files.

tracker3 reset -s

4. (Optionally) Tell tracker3 not to index your Steam folders in case they get borked again.

gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files ignored-directories-with-content "['.steam', '.local/share/Steam', '.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam']"

(Replace those paths with your own.)

5. (Optionally) If your syslog files are massive, you can erase them with the truncate command

sudo truncate -s 0 /var/log/syslog

(or syslog.1, syslog.2 etc depending on which is hogging your drive)

6. ???

7. Profit.

Let me know if any of this is incorrect or there are better ways to accomplish these things.

[Locklear93]

I'm not an expert myself, but regarding cleaning up your logs, I'd let journalctl do it for you.

Upgrading 16.3 to 17.2 education lite (failing) journey

You answered your own question by later using apt dist-upgrade rather than apt upgrade You would see definite errors if the upgrader had failed again. If everything cleared after your second attempt, I would think it likely you are fine. Yes. If you are not seeing the home directory filled with clutter from Downloads, Music, configuration files or other media, then most likely a lack of space will take place in Root - specifically, filling up /var/log files. They can really gobble up space. …

Toward the end of that post, Aravisian mentions using the --vacuum arguments to instruct journalctl to clear out all but 100 MB of logs. This is likely cleaner than truncate, which just hacks off the end of a file with no respect to its contents.