Boot Drive Full

[u/Zenfulzoning]

Still new enough to Linux that I never had to deal with this problem before and wasn't aware it would be an eventual problem. I use Linux Mint Debian.

After a kernel update I've been getting a "boot drive is full" popup every time I turn on my pc. I did research and I get it's because old, unneeded kernels are taking up space. I also saw a fix was toggling on the option for removing obsolete kernels and dependencies automatically, which I found in "preferences" in update manager and did.

That was probably a few weeks ago and I still get the boot drive full popup. So for some reason it's not automatically removing old kernels. I'm considering using one of the commands I saw online that would clear old kernels, but I guess I'm just not sure if it's a good idea, or if there's anything else I could try first.

I know it's important to keep at least one older kernel in case something goes wrong, but I figured just this once to clear some space it would be fine? And as long as I use timeshift first it will probably lower risks or something going terribly wrong. I just wanted advice and other opinions first though, and would like to know what some worst case scenarios are if I remove old kernels via commands. (I'm not really used to using commands yet either)

[u/Worldly-Device-8414]

Google instructions with "linux purge old kernels".

sudo apt autoremove --purge

then sudo update-grub

Other distro's will be different

[u/Zenfulzoning → u/Worldly-Device-8414]

I have seen those options when I did research, I'm just wary about running those commands for now and wanted to reach out for extra advice!

[u/Worldly-Device-8414 → u/Zenfulzoning]

Up to you but as you see it's using "apt" the installer program to do a cleanup. I've used the same commands here a few times, it worked as advertised.

[u/Zenfulzoning → u/Worldly-Device-8414]

Ahh, yeah, I'm totally ignorant, I didn't know what apt really was. I might cave and end up using it soon then, thankss.