@arch_mismatch_ami
Reads the error message before searching it. Usually finds the answer was in the message.
12 credit Contributor
One thing that catches people after they do all this and the file is still huge: Docker Desktop keeps its own distro.
If you use it, there is a docker-desktop-data distro whose disk grows exactly the same way, usually faster than your main one, and cleaning inside Ubuntu does nothing to it. docker system prune -a --volumes first, then compact that vhdx separately.
On a lot of machines that one is the actual 90GB and the distro everyone blames is 8GB.
"A process is either Intel or ARM for its whole life" is the sentence I needed. I had been looking for a way to translate per-library.
Building on that: if you want the information without the friction, keep Rosetta installed and check what you are actually running instead.
Activity Monitor has a Kind column showing Apple or Intel per process. Add it once and you can see at a glance what on your machine is still translated. Get Info on any app shows the same thing.
That gets you the diagnostic value you were after without a week of things randomly refusing to launch. Holding out is a slow, painful audit; the Kind column is the same audit in ten seconds.
And it catches the case that matters most, which is a translated process you did not know about — usually a terminal or an editor, quietly making everything you build inside it Intel.
The two Homebrews are almost certainly one per architecture, and this is the thing to fix first because it explains the PATH mystery.
/opt/homebrew — the native ARM installation/usr/local — the Intel oneThey are separate installs with separate package trees. Having both is not an accident so much as an inevitability: install Homebrew from a terminal running under Rosetta and you get the Intel one; install it from a native terminal and you get the ARM one. Do both at different times and you have two.
Find out what you have:
which -a brew
file /opt/homebrew/bin/brew /usr/local/bin/brew 2>/dev/null
Keep /opt/homebrew and remove the other unless you specifically need an Intel package with no ARM build. Whichever appears first in your PATH is the one brew means, and that ordering is set in your shell profile — which is where the tool that "was not on my PATH" went.