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Apr 28, 2016 7:22 AM in response to ckonrarby i90rr,Just finished testing Monolingual on a spare El Capitan, these are the values of the freed space:
Localisations (system + applications): roughly 200mb
Other architectures from universal binaries: roughly 50mb
While the total amount of restored space (about a quarter of a gigabyte on my spare system) might seem worth the effort I believe that in the end it doesn't change anything. Moreover because the nature of the tool a false step could effectively render a system unusable.
I agree with what people is saying in this thread, the gain is marginal and even if you do things right there's a chance you end up screwing something. Maybe if in the future they add any sort of feature to backup removed stuff that will lower the risk of fiddling with the core system but for now people not sure about how this app works and its implications should definitely avoid it.
Regards.
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Apr 28, 2016 7:44 AM in response to i90rrby Kurt Lang,I've used Monolingual for years. Over that time, I've found a few apps that do not at all like to have language files removed. Those you can setup to exclude from Monolingual's search.
OS X itself can be goofed up with it, especially earlier major releases such as 10.6.x Snow Leopard. Using English as an example, if you only left English unchecked (so all other languages would be removed), you would likely have to reinstall the OS since that would allow Monolingual to also remove localized English such as U.S. English (as it was listed in older versions of OS X and in Monolingual).
Monolingual has matured quite a bit and is smarter about what it leaves on the system. English is the language I use, so it of course is what I have selected in the System Preferences:
Monolingual mirrors that by automatically deselecting English and English (United States) so they won't be removed. If I were to add French in the System Preferences as a secondary language, then French would also automatically be deselected.
It's a perfectly valid argument to ask, "Why do it at all?" when we now routinely use drives measured in Gigabytes or Terabytes. For me, I kind of can't help it. I started with computers where a 30 Megabyte drive was considered big. But you could also fill it pretty fast, so file management was a fact of computer usage for just about everyone. If you didn't need something on the drive, you deleted it to conserve space. It was either that, or spend hundreds, or even over a thousand dollars to get a 120 MB drive. So it's a partly ingrained habit for me to remove unnecessary junk from the drive.
On the technical side, it does save a lot of space I could use for something else. It also reduces the time I have to wait for a backup or restore to complete. I have a 250 GB SSD installed as my startup disk. Keeping as much space free as possible is rather important when you have a lot of large apps installed. Both OS X and Windows like lots of breathing room for the system, so the more space on the SSD I can keep open, the better.
How much space? Removing the unneeded duplicate fonts in the five Office 2016 apps saves 2.4 GB of space. Removing the language files just for those five apps tosses another 1.5 GB of junk. Allowing Monolingual to remove unused languages from the OS is another 1.4 GB of space. So it adds up to quite a bit. Overall on my system, I can open up about a total of 8 to 9 GB of space with all of the various items I remove after setting up a drive.
Of the third party apps I know (from experience) you can't let Monolingual touch are any of the Adobe suite, Quark XPress, Data Rescue and ColorBurst Overdrive.
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Apr 28, 2016 8:02 AM in response to Kurt Langby Esquared,Kurt Lang wrote:
I've used Monolingual for years. Over that time, I've found a few apps that do not at all like to have language files removed. Those you can setup to exclude from Monolingual's search.
Yes, you can. But many users don't. And the "Keeping as much space free as possible" argument doesn't convince me. If you're down to ~20 GB there's only one solution: get a bigger disk or do a thorough cleanup of your personal files – 10 GB down the line you have to anyway.
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Apr 28, 2016 8:08 AM in response to Esquaredby Kurt Lang,I'm not trying to convince anyone. I stated the reasons why I use it, and why others could if they wanted to. But is it necessary? No.
