Usually in my experience docker puts its images in /var/lib/docker. If your /var is on its own partition, or overall your disk space isn't big enough you'll have a bad time.
If you have other partitions with spare room, you can move the subdir docker from /var/lib to the other partition/drive, then symlink /var/lib/docker to that.
Run
docker image prune -af
docker volume prune -af
Thanks, it seems to not help though. Docker Desktop still says "Starting the Docker Engine..." while my disk space is shrinking fast and these commands run indefinitely.
I dunno then. Sorry, wish I could help.
You're on Linux. You can install docker without the fancy desktop GUI. Just install the CLI.
This doesn’t exactly help your situation, but as a developer that builds and publishes docker images most days of my work week, I’d not suggest anyone do the same on a drive smaller than 512GB. Docker builds create layers on the fly as changes are seen and these can range from bytes to hundreds of megs at least. Casual docker development will easily chew through a few hundred gigs after a while, in my experience.
Just trying to put things in perspective: sadly, 70GB is peanuts here if you’re working with popular software stacks. Yes there needs to be some virtual image for docker desktop and due to the above, I usually have mine set at over 200GB.
Docker Desktop on ubuntu? I didn't even know it ran on Ubuntu.
Check your system logs journalctl --pager-end and search for docker. If you haven't used it before enter ?docker and hit enter. That'll search backwards for docker. Or open journalctl --follow in one window and watch the logs, then do what you did before.
Honestly though, I'd not use docker desktop and use straight docker in the command line. I have no idea what Docker Desktop on linux is for as you have to run docker compose up and docker run in the command line anyway, right?
Yeah this is a common issue with docker. If you can get away with running the underlying tool without docker I would almost always recommend that instead.
Can you find out what files are being created? My host disk usually fill up with logs from containers if I don't specify a max log size.