Cleaning Fedora Workstation

After months of daily use, testing software, and general tinkering, my Fedora Workstation setup continues to be reliable and solid.

Fedora has become my go-to distro for development, desktop productivity, and gaming. Running Hyprland (specifically ML4W Hyprland), it’s fast, modern, and refreshingly stable.

Stress Testing

Here’s a list of experiments and system changes I’ve thrown at Fedora — and through it all, I never had to reinstall:

Switched between multiple desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Hyprland)
Installed and removed display managers (GDM, SDDM, no DM)
Played with GPU passthrough (VFIO) for Windows VMs on an NVIDIA RTX 4090
Compiled and ran custom network and audio drivers
Used it as a container host with Podman, Docker, and Flatpaks
Ran multiple local LLMs and Ollama for AI tooling

Despite all Fedora has never failed to boot, corrupted itself, or lost data.

Cleanup Routine

Here are the tools and steps I use to keep Fedora lean and fast:

Remove Unused Flatpaks

flatpak uninstall --unused #Clears unused Flatpak runtimes and app versions.

Clean DNF Cache

sudo dnf clean all #Frees up space by removing package metadata and old caches.

Check Disk Usage with ncdu

A terminal-based disk usage analyzer.

sudo dnf install ncdu
sudo ncdu /

Skip Temporary Mounts

Skips ephemeral or mounted volumes.

sudo ncdu / --exclude /run --exclude /mnt --exclude /media

Clean Out /opt

Manually installed binaries and tools. Remove what you don’t need.

Manage Timeshift Snapshots

Timeshift is amazing.

timeshift-launcher               # Launch the GUI
sudo timeshift --list            # List existing snapshots
sudo timeshift --delete --snapshot 'YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS'  # Delete specific snapshot
sudo timeshift --delete-all --keep 3                      # Keep only latest 3 snapshots

Verify Disk Usage

df -h       # View mount point usage
lsblk       # View partition layout

Remove Orphaned Packages

Finds and removes unused packages.

dnf repoquery --unsatisfied
sudo dnf autoremove

Clean System Logs

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=2weeks   #Frees up space used by logs older than two weeks.

After many years using different operating systems, Fedora is my favorite and most trusted workstation… clean, fast, secure, and highly customizable.

I highly recommend it. Just don’t forget to clean every now and then.

— Franco

Franco Lopez

Modern tech. Old-school curiosity.