I have to confirm this, I also had the same exact problem yesterday. I have about 20 apps installed, paying close attention that they are optified. I had a "memory full, can't send/receive messeges, free up some space" messege popping up in the form a nagging hildon banner, which was entirely unhelpful for 99% of the users, because the Memory applet does not show the root 256MB partition, I have plenty of space left on the other ones. Now, we all know that a full root partition in Linux is a very ugly situation, you can't even remove apps, because there is no space for the lock file, so apt-get is unusable. So, App Manager fails to do anything (without informing the user what the problem might be, it's just empty) and you're back at the terminal, removing files by hand (if you had rootsh installed, otherwise you're screwed). Knowing how Debian packaging works (you have absolutely no way of knowing how much space will a package take up after installation in /opt and how much in /, just the sum of both) , I have no idea how to resolve this situation other than making the root partition much larger.