I recently installed Filelight from the Discover store to solve a mystery: my internal drive was almost full even though I had only a few games installed. It revealed that over 300GB was hoarded in home/.local/share/Trash/files. Every file I’d ever deleted was stuck there. I always thought ’emptying the trash’ would really delete stuff. Is this common knowledge and I missed the memo? Anyway, I cleared up over 300GB and thought to share this in case others didn’t know either.
4 Answers
It does sound weird. Normally, emptying the trash should really remove files and free up space. It’s possible there was some system setting or weird behavior unique to your machine. When you ‘move to trash,’ it might be sending files somewhere unexpected like .local instead of the default trash.
It’s strange, right? For most people, when you delete stuff and empty the trash, the space should free up immediately. Could be a glitch or something specific to your setup. Steam’s uninstall should work the same way too. Maybe others haven’t noticed it because they don’t check their trash directory often.
If your system is moving stuff to a different directory when you ‘move to trash,’ that’s not normal. Fixing the path for where deleted files go might involve some fiddling with system settings. Knowing your system, it might be worth investigating if something changed at an OS level.
That’s definitely not how it’s supposed to happen. It seems bizarre that files are ending up stuck like that. Maybe it’s something buried in system settings. There could be some leftover config or a change in the OS causing this, but it’s just speculation without more data.
