The safest method, if your /home has enough space, is to use it instead of /var for (some) Flatpak installs. You can force any Flatpak install to go to /home by adding --user
to the command.
If you look at the output of flatpak list
it will tell you which package is installed in user home dir and which in system (/var). You can also show the size of each package with flatpak list --columns=name,application,version,size,installation
.
I don’t think you can move installed apps directly between system/user like Steam can (Flatpak is REALLY overdue for a good package manager) but you can uninstall apps from system, then run flatpak remove --unused
, then install them again with --user
.
Please note that apps installed with --user
are only seen by the user that installed them. Also you’ll have to cleanup separately for system and user(s) in the future (flatpak remove --unused
for system, then flatpak remove --unused --user
for each user).
If you end up with resizing /var as the only solution, please post your partition layout first and ask, don’t rush into it. A screenshot from an app like Disk Manager or Gparted should do it, and we’ll explain the steps and the risks.
When you’re ready to resize, you MUST use a bootable stick, not resize from inside the running system. You have to make a stick using something like Ventoy, and drop the ISO for the live version of GParted on the stick, then boot with it and pick the Gparted live. You’ll have to write down the instructions and be careful what you do, and also hope that there’s no power outage during.