Try to use this disk usage analysis utility, it is the best for me.

[…] will complain or anything, considering this is a company issued laptop. This is where having a nice disk usage visualization built into the UI would really come in handy. Instead we had to either do this manually (by looking […]

@ Chris Wellons:

Isn’t dolphin now the prefered tool for file management in KDE?

@ Travis McCrea:

Yep. Visualization is a powerful tool! We seem to be more attuned to visual stimuli rather than to raw data – like numbers. That’s why you hardly can talk about any data without whipping out some graphs, bars and pie charts.

Aww, Tino beat me to suggesting baobab.

Nothing says pay attention more than a shiny red bar right? :P

We’ve had that for a long, long time in the linux community. It’s called conky. :)

There is a plugin for Konqueror that can do the file size visualization like xdiskusage. I don’t know which plugin is it, I just “apt-get install konq-plugins” and it’s there. I do pretty much all of my file system manipulations via shell or Emacs dired mode, but I’ve brought Konqueror out occasionally to do heavy cleanup work.

My secret to reducing my filesystem housecleaning is to do a lot of stuff in /tmp. Stuff that represents 15 minutes or less of work. Writing my little tests programs in there, untaring tarballs I don’t plan to keep around for long, short-term wget downloads, etc. If it turns out to be important, or something that I don’t want to lose easily, it then gets moved to ~. This policy works well on all the systems I use except my long-running server, where /tmp is only cleared a couple times a year.

For the gnome desktop “baobab” (or “Disk usage analyser” as it is presented in the Ubuntu menus) is a nice alternative to xdiskusage. I use it all the time. But I agree that it would be nice if it didn’t have to spend 15 minutes data collecting before you can use it.

Someone should sit down and re-think this mess with beagle, tracker, and locate databases, as well as other file system metadata statistics (as disk usage) and try to get it more integrated with hooks in the file system, rather than background daemons that starts and eats up your disk cache so suddenly your computer grinds to halt.

Identifying big folders can be a source of problems, just as much as people who want to keep their computer “clean” and start moving around system files. Imagine someone decides Windows\System32 is way too big (because it IS) and tries to delete it ?

Well, these bars do look pretty, but … wait a minute ! Your OS partition is 450GB big ?! And with only 40GB free ? What happened to good computer practices, with separate OS and data partitions ? Note this assumes you took a screenshot of your own computer, and the Fallout 3 disk confirms this, but this could be an attempt to mislead us ;)

Kdirstat is pretty nice too (I think windirstat is an imitation of it, though I may have that backwards), but as you say it still takes several minutes to figure out the sizes and whatnot. A relational background process would be nice as long as it only ran when you told it to, or only when the disk & cpu were idle.