Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Mini PC: Avoid snap pollution

I’m not a heavy user of snaps particularly on the Raspberry Pi 5. I find that installing software with Flatpak is a better solution than snap in most instances even though both are wasteful of disk space. But occasionally it’s useful to use a snap.

After installing a few snaps, df output gets overridden with /dev/loop entries. Here’s an example.

A snap is a SquashFS file carrying content alongside metadata to tell the system how it should be manipulated.

What’s the easiest remedy to clean up df’s output besides avoiding snaps altogether?

I can exclude squashfs with the -x flag. And use the -h option to make the output human readable.

$ df -hx "squashfs"

Another solution is to use an alternative to df. There are quite a few alternatives to df featured in this roundup. My favourite is dysk which can be installed with cargo, Rust’s package manager. First install cargo.

$ sudo apt install cargo

Now let’s try to build dysk with the command:

$ cargo install dysk

dysk fails to build because the version of rustc installed with the Raspberry Pi OS is too old.

It’s suggested re-running cargo install with --locked.

$ cargo install dysk --locked

That didn’t help.

Let’s remove the old version of rustc and cargo we’ve got.

$ sudo apt remove rust cargo

Let’s install the current version of Rust. Issue the command:

$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Select option 1 by pressing enter.

I’ve now installed the current version of Rust on my Pi 5.

$ rustc --version

Let’s try compiling dysk again.

$ cargo install dysk

Success, dysk is now installed on my system.

Issue the command:

$ dysk

Here’s example output from dysk. In my opinion the output is much neater than with df.

Let’s go the whole hog and use an alias, so I can just type df. I’m going to use the -s label flag in my alias.

Add the following line to ~/.bashrc using a text editor such as nano.

alias df='dysk -s label'

Log out of the shell or type: $ source .bashrc

Now when I type df, I get the output.

This article was written on a Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB RAM) provided by SunFounder, a company focused on STEAM education with products like Open-source robots, Arduino & Raspberry Pi Kits, display screens, and other smart devices.

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