One of the SUSE experts pointed out that Linux is reserving space which can be reclaimed by using the following command.
tune2fs -m0 /dev/hda5
Where /dev/hda5 is home directory.
Type mount to see which is device for the home directory.
Type df to see the free space before and after running this command.
Note: This space is been reserved so that it can be reclaimed in case of bad blocks. So reducing this may give you some free space but at the cost of some redundancy. So do this if you are running out of disk space and if your computer data is not very critical.
I have tried this on SUSE Linux and it worked, should also work on other Linux Distributions.