Originally Posted by Nailz:
“Does anyone know why Ubuntu has so many updates?
I don't know what 99% of them do so install them all at shutdown however I am concerned about disk space and performance. I am running Ubuntu 12.4.
I also have a Xubuntu laptop that has no room left so don't install updates and it still works fine.”
I must admit the constant updates on Linux (especially Ubuntu based distros) can become annoying, but you should only need to restart the PC after a kernel update.
And when Ubuntu moves to version 4 of the linux kernel, you shouldn't even need to restart for kernel updates.
As to the space issue, unfortunately Ubuntu leaves all the old kernels installed and taking up space (another bugbear of mine).
You can manually delete them yourself though very easily, using synaptic package manager.
What I do is I leave the current kernel plus the immediately preceding one and regularly clear out the rest.
It saves about 250 MB per kernel version, so if you clear out four old kernels, you save yourself 1 GB.
If you type uname -r into the terminal it'll tell you what kernel version you are running, then open up synaptic package manager (available from the Ubuntu Software Center) and search for "linux". Just scroll down and right click and mark for removal all the old kernel version files you don't want, then click the Apply button.
For each version there are usually 4 files to find - 2 linux-headers files, a linux-image and a linux-image-extra file.
Someone else may have a prettier way of doing it, but that's the way I've always done it.
If you regularly do that, you'll find that the core Linux OS plus apps very rarely gets above 10 GB, unless you install a lot of games or something.