BleachBit
FreeClears caches and traces without selling you a "speed boost"
An open-source system cleaner. It clears browser caches and history, application temporary files, logs, thumbnail caches and the recycle bin, and can also shred files (overwriting before deletion to prevent recovery) and wipe free disk space. Cleaning rules cover over a thousand applications.
Why we picked it
"System cleaner" is one of the dirtiest categories in free software: a permanent tray icon, daily pop-ups announcing "1,247 junk files found, drive health 62/100", one-click acceleration, a bundled browser, and a funnel toward the premium version. Frequently the cleaner is the worst thing on the machine.
BleachBit is the clean option in that slot. 6,574 stars, GPL-3.0 — no tray resident, no health score, no boost button, no paid tier. Open it, tick what to clean, preview what would be deleted, confirm, and close it again.
What it clears:
- Browsers: caches, history, cookies, sessions and form data for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and others, selectively enough to clear caches while keeping logins.
- Application temporary files: system temp directories, logs, crash reports, thumbnail caches and per-application cache folders, with rules covering over a thousand programs.
- The recycle bin and recent-documents lists.
- On Linux additionally: APT and DNF package caches (often a substantial recovery), old kernels, and localization files.
Two further features belong to privacy:
- File shredding: ordinary deletion only marks space as free while the data remains on disk. Shredding overwrites with random data first, so recovery tools find nothing.
- Wiping free space: fills and clears the "deleted but not yet overwritten" regions of a disk, useful before handing an old drive on.
To be clear about:
- Use the preview. Its defaults are not aggressive, but cleaning cannot be undone. The preview lists exactly which files would go — read it first. Be especially careful not to clear browser cookies and passwords casually, which means logging back into everything.
- Cleaning does not make a computer faster. This deserves honesty: deleting a few gigabytes of cache on a modern system changes performance essentially not at all. The value is reclaimed space and cleared traces, not speed. Any software claiming cleaning produces meaningful speedups is overselling.
- No macOS build. One existed historically; official downloads now cover Windows and Linux.
- Multi-pass wiping is not meaningful on SSDs. Wear levelling makes overwrites unreliable; genuine erasure on an SSD means the drive's own Secure Erase or full-disk encryption.
Who it suits: anyone who wants to reclaim space and clear traces periodically without leaving a predatory utility resident on their system.