Comment 111 for bug 1357093

I'm running Ubuntu 17.04 and whilst I have had the problem for so long I can't be sure, I think I have had this problem since 15.04. I keep my software completely up to date and all updates have been applied to date. I can honestly say that this issue is by no means fixed. The reference to unattended-upgrades is a red herring. I boils down to a faulty kenal cleanup routine and a poor default for the boot partition at install time.

I have over the many months of experiencing the problem, finally come up with the following work around set of commands that free up the space required to keep me going with a few more updates...

sudo apt-get autoremove;sudo apt-get autoclean;sudo apt-get clean

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Although this sorts the problem out when I get the "not enough space" issue it doesn't mean that the underlying problem shouldn't be sorted out.

It takes time and effort that shouldn't be required.
It has taken many months to come up with a decent work-around.
I can't use this type of install for family and friends as they are not savvy enough to use the work-around and shouldn't need to be using sudo in the first place.

I see this issue is marked as wishlist. This is a travesty. It is a bug pure and simple.