The most my homedir has ever grown in one year is 3.2 GB, and I don't really go out of my way to keep things tidy. I'd be very pissed off if things started pestering me to clear stuff up years before it actually became a problem.
lol! This comment made my night. In short: low available disk space, lots of projects requiring disk space.
No I don't see OS notifications about low disk space (at least on my macbook), some 3rd party applications give me notifications about low disk space though. I can confirm that all of my USB-C ports work! I have 2 local drives and a remote NAS that backup all the 'critical' data from my machine.
Unlike other operating systems I've had experience with, macOS is the most capable of operating in a (near) 'disk full' state. Where something like Windows will go from crying about the available disk space, to failing opening explorer, macOS will continue running just fine for general usage.
> Wonder what other aspects of your life you choose to live so dangerously close to the edge as well?
As for this: I've spent the last year living in India, where most people I've met think they are invincible, so I roll the dice every day!
I used to get the OS out of space warning a lot from macOS. I used to have a 128GB SSD, and Adobe would fill up the drive with cache in the Application Support folder frequently. My newer MBP has a larger SSD, but I also manage the storage much closer now.
This experience I have of low disk space is only on Sequoia which I haven't seen give an OS notification until 5gb left, which again doesn't happen often.
Over the following year, roughly 20 releases later, my disk was full. Xcode generates a ton of hidden cruft in the DerivedData folder during every build/release that I wasn't even aware of! I spent a couple days googling and trying free & paid disk space analyzers (sidenote: I didn't realize how good we have it in Windows-land, there are so many good free tools but in Apple-land they are all so frustrating to use and most of them are totally useless for this particular case). Eventually, I found an Apple forum thread explaining where Xcode hides its generated build data, it was like 8GB of stuff per build! I set a calendar reminder for every 12 months to clean this folder.
I can't move anything else to an external drive really because what's left is necessary for build environment. I don't use the Mac for anything except development, so I've literally removed everything and it's down to barebones but it's still a struggle. If I had known I would have invested another $150 for the 512GB version.