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How to Clean Up Flatpak Apps and Reclaim Disk Space

Optimizing Disk Space on Linux with Flatpak Cleanup Commands

Luca Berton
5 min readNov 20, 2023

Introduction

Flatpak, a popular package management system, provides a sandboxed environment for running applications. However, this sandboxed nature can result in the accumulation of significant disk space over time. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of cleaning up Flatpak apps to free up precious disk space on your Linux system.

Where Flatpak Packages are Installed

When you install a Flatpak package, it is stored in two primary locations on your system:

  1. System Installation Directory: `/var/lib/flatpak`

This directory contains all the files, metadata, application files, and runtime files shared among all Flatpak apps.

2. User Installation Directory: `~/.local/share/flatpak`
Flatpak data specific to each user, including installed applications, is stored in this directory.

How to Find Out the Size of Flatpak Apps

Before proceeding with cleanup, it’s helpful to identify the disk space occupied by Flatpak apps. Here are some commands you can use:

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Luca Berton
Luca Berton

Written by Luca Berton

I help creative Automation DevOps, Cloud Engineer, System Administrator, and IT Professional to succeed with Ansible Technology to automate more things everyday

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