Yep, I dug pretty deep into that thread and saw this is about average for most. It looks like the newer Samsung phones are the worst in terms of this but it's all over the map. Ars ran with it a little prematurely because there is some truth about having to set the phone up properly to get even close to an accurate reporting of the system size but even then it still ranks as the largest of them. It also reminds me of that old saying in regard to VRAM that the more you have the more it'll use. It appears that Samsung phones with 1 TB can have much larger OS installs, for whatever reasons.
If windows is any example... It's probably due to some sort of indexing and caching.
After discovering when I was still on a 1tb drive that my windows 11 home was using over 150 gig for the drive indexing... I did some cleanup. So just something to keep in mind.
I do that about once a quarter. It always shocks me, with 10, how it'll say that maybe 8 GB can be saved by deleting old update files, which take forever to do, and then usually only frees up around 4-5 GB. Still, though, a good practice to keep. It's been something I've had to do out of necessity's sake for the last few years because my 1st OS SATA SSDs, like other users, were usually around 128 GB, and even with Windows trimmed down it could take upwards of 60 GB. These days I'm happy to have OS drives that are a bit bigger NVMe's at 1 TB (I went with these more so because there are speed differences at the 512 GB level) but still don't want to let things get wasteful.
There are a lot of preinstalled things that we all use... in Windows.
Hmm, yeah, we use them, but that's a different question than if they need to be there in the first place - because replacement apps exist for every one of those things, and most of them are better than what's provided "in the box".
Oh yea I agree here FULLY. I'm sure the explorer is somehow using the edge back end as well.
If I ever go back to Android for a phone I'll probably do the same. Currently trapped with Apple due to the entire family only wanting to use Facetime for most calls.
Yeah, I still use CC Cleaner and it always shocks me when it tells me that Edge is running and asks to force it to close. I'm like, I wasn't even using the d*** thing. Add the whole AI thing into it and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be looking into hacks to block that thing since basic common sense measures are becoming less effective in managing it.
Makes Linux look better and better all the time.
You mean, you don't use Arch, btw?
