Is 8gb enough to support Ubuntu MATE without storage issues?

Question

After becoming familiar with Rasbian and Terminal, I decided to try something new with ubuntu MATE. Aside from the microSD card that the Raspberry pi came with, which I want to keep the Rasbian operating system loaded on, I have an 8 gig microSD card at my disposal. I wrote the image to the card, and I have it up and running with no issues.

Here's where the trouble starts. I have used my pi for a few days, and I have started getting low memory warnings. I only have around 400 megabytes of free storage left. I have tried resizing the file system and removing unneeded packages, but my question doesn't concern the means of making free space.

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Is eight gigabytes enough to support ubuntu MATE?

Do I need more? 16? 32? 64?

Answer 1

I don't know how much space Ubuntu mate needs specifically, but the Raspberry Pi maxes out at 32 GB, and that's the size I use on all but one of my Pi's and I never have space problems. Amazon usually has 32 GB sd cards for about 17 bucks. 8 GB cards are just about useless, imho.

The Ubuntu mate website says: You’ll need a microSD card which is 4GB or greater to fit the image. The file system can be resized to occupy the unallocated space of the microSD card, similar to Raspbian.

Answer 2

Should work on 8GB. But there will be storage issues in time, as only about 700MB will be unused on clean system.

Please note, that if you are buying a card for RPI, buy a good one (class 10). On low-end cards, it works like a crap.

Answer 3

8 GB will be perfectly fine and will leave you with about 3 GB of space left on the card after install.