Do you ever have to do any regular maintenance?

Solution 1:

Not really. There is no need to defrag the disks, because they don't get fragmented unless you have like 99% of the disk full. There is no need for a cleanup, unless you are really low on space. Performance is not an issue, like in Windows. There is also no need to cleanup the registry, because Ubuntu doesn't have one.

However, some applications might need maintenance. For instance, Firefox databases might become bloated with time, so you need to vacuum them to keep the performance high. Any application that uses SQLite files can suffer from the same issue.

If you want to do cleanup, see CCleaner equivalent?.

What I do to avoid wasting space is to always cleanup the apt cache. This is what I use when upgrading packages:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove

The first command cleanup the cache, the second update the software sources, the third upgrades necessary packages and the last one uninstall unnecessary software.

Solution 2:

You want to make regular backups of all important documents, that's the most important "regular maintenance" task there is. But of course you're already doing this... ;-)

Furthermore, you can use applications like Computer Janitor to clean up unneeded libraries, old kernels, etc.

In most cases fragmentation is not really a big issue, and in any case it won't harm you as much as it did in the old days. The files that are most likely to get fragmented are probably log files (which really isn't all that important; if you need them microseconds are not what you care about) and more in general when small chunks of data get written to several files in parallel. I wouldn't worry about this though, as long as you don't see filesystem performance degrade badly (my main desktop was installed in 2007 and upgraded ever since, and I don't see any performance issues, even if at some times both partitions have been quite full).