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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • Reminds me of the programs that make the kernel drop FS buffers in an attempt to free up RAM. Or hog as much memory as they can in an attempt to have unused things swapped to disk. Yeah, they free up RAM all right, but at the expense of actual speed.

    Most of the time, this junk is actively harmful. Forget it, modern Linux uses optimized defaults.

    You can get more performance out of your hardware by switching to from heavyweight to lightweight programs - for example, instead of Skype (which uses Electron), choose some other way to chat like irssi for IRC. Instead of Gnome, choose i3 or dwm or something like that. You need a bunch of tradeoffs and learning, though, to really get the most out of your hardware.



  • Not saying my practice is the best one, but here’s what I do:

    • EFI system partition is mounted on /boot
      • kernel is held here. In case of distros like NixOS etc that keep around old kernels, a small ESP might run out of space. I make mine at least 1GB.
    • the rest of the disk is one luks2 volume
    • inside the encrypted volume, there’s a BTRFS volume
    • there’s a subvolume for /home
    • and a subvolume for every distro I have (which is usually 1, but sometimes I tinker or switch)
    • Kernel command line parameters specify the btrfs subvol with the right distro to boot.
    • for NixOS, you need a bootloader (to choose the right kernel). Systemd-boot works well, and its configuration is easily readable. I never figured out how to work with GRUB2, its configuration is just too confusing.
    • or if you like Arch, dispense with bootloaders and just use EFISTUB. You can put kernel cmdline params into EFI bootloader options with efibootmgr.

    Simple yet complete. Efficient, and extensible - for example, now that everything is a subvolume, I can easily snapshot it, then create backups with rsync off the snapshot, to avoid inconsistent state between backed-up files.