First, to get an idea as to what system you're using, please include the information requested at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux
That's a good catch and it is definitely something needing to be looked into.
Woops, sorry about that.
https://gist.github.com/7eeae3b2b571c66a5c98
Added to the OP.
It looks like the "Delete Local Content" option deletes the multi-gigabyte .gcf files containing the TF2 content, but anything that was unpacked at runtime is left on disk.
Team Fortress 2 is moving to the new install format that doesn't use .gcf files, and will be properly cleaned up when local files are deleted once this is rolled out.
Nothing extracted yet.
I had installed TF2 Beta for some reason (I have no idea why, I'm now using regular TF2), and since I'm not using it anymore, I right clicked on it, and clicked "delete local data". A few seconds later, the "play" button had switched to "install", and everything seemed like it had worked fine.
This is not the case, however. Upon further investigation, I found the entire "Team Fortress 2 Beta" folder in both ~/.steam/root/SteamApps and ~/.steam/steam/SteamApps, still taking up a whole 2Gb each.
So for whatever reason, "deleting local content" in steam isn't actually deleting the local content.
Anyone know if I can just go ahead and delete these folders? And if there's a way to make steam actually delete the local content?
System Info:
https://gist.github.com/7eeae3b2b571c66a5c98