Bad Practice: Unity installation far larger than the install guide from the hub.

Unity Engine
,
1

Unity hub states that the install size for each Unity is about 5GB.
However from the moment you create your first project Unity will begin to massively fill up storage space with the package manager and cache adding about 10 GB in probably just a week.
If you use the asset store that’s even more space but that’s not the focus of this post and neither is the GI cache.

Thing is Unity just seems to randomly download stuff I don’t use especially multiple versions of the same thing I got like Burst 1.4, 1.6 and 1.8 or whatever each taking up about 1GB - how can this be, I don’t even use those anyway?
Why is there no garbage management here - i actually gotta go deep to sort this stuff out…the more time I spend on unnecessary maintenance the less energy, confidence and time for game development.

This is really bad practice and I don’t know how it got away with this all this time the minimum install size is WRONG.

It’s time to change this.

The first step is to be honest and change the HUB install size from 5GB to 5GB + 10GB for the local files.
Additionally options to provide a installation folder for the local files is HUGE and very much needed because when the local folder gets that large and fluctuates so much an SSD is not ideal for this and a alternate larger storage HD should be used for this…

Good news is Unity hub already allows new Unity versions to be installed in different HD but we still greatly need for all local files too. Having it all in one place with garbage management is great.

Please let me know the update I really don’t find this kind of practice from such a mature engine to be acceptable in these days and ages.

2

All the built-in packages are already included in the Editor folder (under /Editor/Data/Resources/PackageManager/BuiltInPackages).

The displayed install size isn’t necessarily wrong. For instance, the folder for 2021.3.0f1 is around 5GB big and the Hub shows the very same size. It is solely meant for the Editor itself. Obviously, if you create a brand new project, the Editor will import additional necessary packages that are then cached. Downloaded assets are also stored on your drive and cached in your project’s library.

The wording “10GB for local files” could also be misleading. I’d suggest something like “Additional disk space may be required” instead.
.

3

@Mauri Thanks for the feedback.

Additional disk space required is too vague a term to describe 2 x more space than the engine itself in app data, local, roaming etc and this is without the Asset Store involved.

There certainly is a need for Garbage Cleanup. I manually deleted 7GB of Burst versions from the local and roaming folders and Unity didn’t download them or have any issues. It may download them if I edit scripts but it will probably download the latest version,