Way Too many icons

Support & Help Requests
1

I have over 186,000 png files.

That seems rather excessive.

find / -name *.png

For ex.

/home/andy/.cache/inkscape/icons/ has 246 icons for a program I no longer have.

I suspect that uninstalls do NOT delete their icons ??

2

Nothing is added or removed from your home directory when packages are installed/removed. Maintaining your home directory is your responsibility. What harm are the icons doing exactly?

3

Most icons I found are not in the home directory.

If the icons are not used, it’s a waste of space and inefficient.

One thing good about most WIndows programs was that the icon was embedded in the executable.
So when a program was uninstalled, there were no lingering icons.

4

How much space? What efficiency loss?

5

That’s just how most Linux distributions handle icons. Nothing Ubuntu MATE specific.

6

So how many icons are in your wallet ? :slight_smile:

7

The .cache directory that is in your home is −as the name implies− a cache for applications. I.e. a directory in which applications put often used files so that they don’t have to be reloaded every single time. You can safely delete what you find inside that is not relevant anymore (e.g. Inkscape files).

It works a similar way on Windows, except that this kind of files are stored in the various temporary / Application Data directories scattered over the system and I wouldn’t be suprised if uninstalled software leaves them in place like on Linux.

The icons of the softwares themselves aren’t embedded in the exe on Linux as on Windows but it doesn’t really matter, as they’re installed on system level and removed when you uninstall a package properly installed (from the repos). If you have applications icons (used for the launchers) in you home dir, they belong to applications that have been manually installed in your home (like Wine apps). In that case, as @Wimpy pointed out, they’re not removed because they’re personal data and the system never ever removes personal data.

As for a waste of space and efficiency, I don’t really understand either: at worse, you’ll waste a few dozens of MB. Does it really matter to you?

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8

Depends on the size of the icons, but a gig here and a gig there surely doesn’t add up to anything bad unless you’re trying to squeeze every lasy possible byte from a partition, and even then doing that makes Ext4 go absolutely haywire.

9

Why would that “make ext4 go haywire.” :slight_smile:

/home/andy/.cache/thumbnails/normal/ has 1800 icons or 20 Mb.
(I was told I can clear them out manually.)

Their dates range from Feb 2017 to the today.

So it looks like the O.S. never clears them out.

10

Because when you have only a few meg left Ext4 becomes painfully slow on a mechanical disk drive.

11

I am not aware of any linux distros that are only a few megs. :slight_smile:

DSL is 50 Mbs.

I will need some facts to convince me.

My Ubuntu installation is 38 Mbs.

12

Please tell me English isn't your first language and you're not trolling me?

I mean to say when you are almost out of disk space, which can happen if you get on a full-out downloading spree and not keep track of your storage.

13

So on my daily driver the are 8,577 PNG image files in /home/steven/.cache/thumbnails/normal

Dates ranging from October 6, 2016 to September 5, 2017 and a total of 103.9 MB of used space. All this tells me is I haven't cleared my cache on this system in nearly a year.

During this time my total cache has grown to 14,349 items, totaling 432.2 MB. But I still have 77.7 GB of free space on this partition.

That's our job Bubba :wink:
I should probably clear mine soon.

14

The thumbnails (in ~/.thumbnails and ~/.cache/thumbnails) are the thumbnails for pictures and videos generated by the file manager. You can delete them but they’ll be recreated over and over. If you don’t want them, you can turn off thumbnails in the preferences of Caja. I haven’t checked if it stops them being recreated, though, but I’d assume so.

AFAIK, there’s a hard limit somewhere controlling the size of the thumbnails cache: older ones will be deleted to generate new ones. Not sure if it’s a limit hardcoded in the thumbnailers or is it’s set through Gconf / Dconf.

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15

Don't wait too long else or your o.s. might crash. :slight_smile:

16

Thanks. I will turn off thumbnails and see what happens.

17

Genuinely curious fixit7, what system are you running where this is even remotely an issue? Is it a maker board like a Raspberry Pi Zero? Or something else perhaps? I've never seen this complaint before.

18

I am running UM 16.04 on a desktop system.

I did another search for pngs and found 61,000.

A lot better.

I wonder if my 1st search was somehow corrupted ?

19

Well, if you deleted thumbnails between your first search and now, it would explain why you have far less PNG files. It’s unlikely that a search can be “corrupted”.

20

Do you understand that if you have applications that use those files from the cache, by your deleting them, the application has to recreate them every time it starts, potentially slowing down responsiveness on platter-based drives while that process is being undertaken.

It's 2017, not 1997. This absolutely isn't an issue unless you are critical on space. I honestly feel you're looking for a problem that isn't there. :slight_smile: (if that's the case, please don't look in your .thumbs folder..)

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