When I bought the Fairphone 4 it came with /e/OS 1.18.
Then, each and every time a new /e/OS release became available, I updated the phone and now it has /e/OS version 2.1.
Are there eventual “leftovers” on my FP4 of all the previously installed /e/OS versions which might be occupying space/resources and which might be safely removed? I’d like to stress the word “safely”.
In the negative case, very good!
In the positive case, is there a detailed procedure on how to safely remove those eventual “leftovers” from previously installed /e/OS versions from the FP4?
I don’t have a very deep insight into this. But I’d rather not expect a lot of leftovers from previously installed OS versions. I think every update writes the according system partitions with new data and so overwrites (and deletes) the old ones. Anyway for the system partitions you couldn’t do a lot because (without root) you’re not able to write to these areas or delete anything there. And even a factory reset would not touch most partitions as it only resets all data parts.
The biggest leftovers from previous /e/ installations could be the update sources themselves. Make sure you have “Delete updates when installed” enabled in the “Preferences” of the “Updater”. This would automatically (and safely) remove those leftovers.
Apart from that, there could always stay “leftovers” in the data part of your phone which could affect performance or stability. So after several updates or even mor major version upgrades a “factory reset” might be recommendable. But this probably not what you mean with “safely removed”…
