I have a HP Stream 14. It only has a 32 GB hard drive. An eMMC, so,I can’t remove it to upgrade.
Windows took up most of the 32 GB, so I thought to put Linux on it. I’ve made the bootable USB with Ubuntu 18.04,and tried it out.
Now, I want to install it onto my internal drive, but it says it needs 30GB, which seems a bit excessive.
Should I just pick one of the lighter distros, like Mint or Mate? Or can I stick with regular Ubuntu?
Straight-up Ubuntu with GNOME3 is drive-space-absorbent; Ubuntu Flavours less so. Want a lighter, smaller OS? Well, there's Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu MATE, and especially Lubuntu, all supported here. (Mint, bless their hearts, has diverged so much we don't support it here.) Pick a Flavour, any Flavour, and you will have oodles of room, even on the 32.
Now that Canonical has seized upon Snaps, OS drives are filling up rapidly. If you don't use them and install from other sources, the OS drive doesn't fill up as rapidly.
eMMCs CAN be upgraded. I threw a 500GB eMMC into a Thinkpad T420. Works great with two different OS on it as well as a /home partition chock full of Stuff. Bought it on Big River Trading Outfit.
If you need more storage, see item 3 above, or add a tiny USB drive or this one which does not stick very far out of the socket for convenience, and leave it there.
Ubuntu does indeed recommend 25GB of hard-drive space as 'Recommended Minimum System Requirements'.
Well I have an Acer c720p chromebook here with an 32GB hard-drive. I have a full Ubuntu installation on it with additional software. Still have about 20GB of disk space free for my data.