Comparing disk usage before and after Ubuntu upgrade to a fresh install

As mention the last post I was going to post some numbers about how much disk space which is in used before, and after upgrading Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu.

Test scenario

Desktop Edition(upgrade)
Install with ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso (Default settings)
Run ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean’ to get the latest updates
Check disk usage
Upgrade using ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso
Run ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean’ to get the latest updates
Check disk usage

Desktop Edition(fresh install)
Default install using ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
Run ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean’ to get the latest updates
Check disk usage

Server edition(upgrade)
Install with ubuntu-7.10-server-i386.iso (Default settings)
Run ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean’ to get the latest updates
Check disk usage
Network upgrade to 8.04
Run ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean’ to get the latest updates(just do be sure)
Check disk usage

Server edition(fresh install)
Default install using ubuntu-8.04-server-i386.iso

Run ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean’ to get the latest updates
Check disk usage

Disk usage

Desktop Edition
7.10 with updates: 2.1G
8.04 after upgrade: 2.4G
8.04 fresh: 2.1G
Cruft: 0.3G

Server Edition
7.10 with updates: 498M
8.04 after upgrade: 595M
8.04 fresh: 497M
Cruft 98M

Conclusion

There seems to be a good deal of cruft left behind after the upgrade even if you follow the normal upgrading procedures. Please note that this from a default install; No packages was added. I guess that almost anyone who uses Ubuntu install more than just the default, and that would probably make the difference even bigger. And what if you did not do a clean install of 07.04 either, you began with 06.06-LTS and upgraded whenever a new release was out.

Later I will do the same test with CentOS, openSUSE, Archlinux OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. I’m looking forward to see who wins this test :)