wolf

I am playing around with Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon and I really like the painless updates.

Still, my daily driver for some years now is Debian, and I have a decent setup via Ansible - everything just works for me.

My question is mostly to long term Linux users, which use Linux in a professional context and jumped from a distribution like Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE or Debian to NixOS, Silverblue, Aeon etc.

What is your experience? How did your workflows change on your immutable Linux distribution? Did you try immutable and went back to a more traditional distribution - why? How long are you running the immutable distribution and what issues and perks did you run into?

At the moment I am using Debian Bookworm and I can setup/configure 100% of my setup automatically everything via Ansible. (Only thing left after the Ansible script is login to my online accounts/email which I would rather not automate.)

Is there a way/does anyone have this working/running on Silverblue?

To be more concrete: After I install Silverblue with default settings, I want to automatically install all needed flatpaks, configure them (and link configuration files to a github repository) and also setup some toolboxes for development. With one command/step, like running Ansible.

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I got a cheap netbook style laptop for traveling some weeks ago (HP Stream 11" with 4 GB of RAM and a N4120). Didn't expect much more from this hardware than opening a few browser tabs and doing some retro gaming via Steam.

Shared RAM with graphics card means that 3.64 GB of RAM are effectively usable for the OS. This was even too little RAM to open a handful of tabs w/o having tabs being unresponsive for seconds sometimes in a very annoying way. Another thing which made trouble was the Wifi - I guess it went into power saving, was swapped and didn't load fast enough to provide a good experience. (Of course I wasted an hour checking for Wifi drivers/support.)

In short: Even for my low expectations for this laptop it was an underwhelming experience.

First step was to look at my vm.swappiness and set it to 10, which already helped, but still the machine had hiccups and annoying timeouts.

In a last, desperate effort I enabled ZRAM on the laptop... and literally WTF: Saying it is a night and day difference doesn't do the experience justice. Typing this words now on the Stream, which I use exactly the same way as my much more beefy other machines (my next worst computer has 8G of RAM and an Intel Core i3), browsing with 10 open tabs, e-mail client open on another virtual desktop... it is crazy, it makes the Stream fun to use and I use it at home for everything which isn't heavily CPU/IO bound.

What surprised me the most: No hiccups, no timeouts and it even fixed the Wifi issues on this little machine. Didn't expect this would be possible, especially with a N4120 and 3.64 GB of RAM.

In short, my laptop changed from not even reaching my low/realistic expectations to being my favorite technical purchase of the last years, thanks to ZRAM.

Besides making this a ZRAM appreciation post, I really want to spread the word about it. Especially for old hardware and limited RAM situations, IMHO it should be the first thing which comes to mind/is recommended.

Fedora and PopOS use it by default, so it is well tested and should IMHO again, be a default at least for desktop setups.

Give it a try - supposedly it even improved the experience on much more beefy computers for gaming etc.

I bought a HP Stream 11 laptop with an N4120 / 4 GB Ram and 64 eMMC / sd card reader for traveling and one of the main selling points for me was the sd card reader to extend the internal storage easily.

Using Debian 12 / Kernel 6.1 I installed everything but /boot and the EFI partition on a reasonably sized (512 GB) sd card. By default I use nowadays Btrfs with transparent compression and noatime as my root filesystem, so this is what I used on the sd card, too.

I pulled an update for a git repository, around 100 MB in binary files (don't ask) to the laptop, and basically the update was received and afterwards for several minutes there was no progress. When I checked what was going on with htop I saw several Btrfs housekeeping processes working on the sd card and by that time I simply shut down the laptop. (My fault, I didn't record which processes exactly.) RAM was okay (no swapping). The sd card also had much more than 10% free space for Btrfs. Additionally, the git pull did not update any files, so copy on write was not triggered.

After this experience I reinstalled Debian on the sd card, but his time with ext4/noatime. I pulled the exact same git repository, with 400 MB of new binary data, and git pull finished w/o trouble in less than a minute.

I am tech aware enough to set the 'C' attribute for virtual machines on Btrfs and run Btrfs on all my physical and virtual machines for several years now.

My deployment is 100% automated via Ansible, so I am sure the only change was Btrfs -> ext4.

I try to understand, why Btrfs performed so much worse than ext4 for me on exactly the same hardware and for the same workloads. Any explanations or pointers to places to find answers are very much appreciated!

After years of using Gnome 3/4 with a modified setup on Debian, I returned to Xfce, and am quite impressed by the state of Xfce 4.18.

My background: Using Linux since 1998 or so (yes, I am old) as my main OS, I used a lot of different window mangers and DEs.

Gnome 3 actually never really matched my personal workflows, but I always discovered many paper cuts using other desktop environments and thanks to dconf at least I could automatically configure Gnome 3 in a way which made it usable for me.

For life reasons I needed a cheap, small sub notebook (or netbook, as it was called when I was younger), and settled on the HP Stream 11 with an N4120. No way to run Gnome on this machine and work fluently, so I recalled that Xfce was at the sweet spot between being full featured, fast and light on memory. (+stable and Gtk+ based, KDE hasn't been an option for me since 3.5 and I check it regularly.)

I got more than I bargained for, Xfce felt so quick, responsive, good and simply sane that I run it now on every Linux desktop/laptop I own. (But my entertainment system, which I only use for Netflix.)

What I really like about Xfce 4.18:

• Speed and responsiveness, even on my beefy machine I feel the difference
• Sane size of titlebars etc.
• Customizable panels out of the box and xfce4-panel-profiles for 1 click setups
• Thunars split view. I get tired by the Gnome developers, who removed this feature from Nautilus, explain that two Nautilus windows side by side are equivalent to a split view. It is not
• Ansible support for xfconf out of the box to automate the deployment of my configuration
• Light on RAM: Around 400 MB vs a little above 1 G for Gnome
• Everything I need for my DE is included, no search for plugins which might or might not fix my problems
• Useful and fast default applications (Thunar, Mousepad, Parole...)
• After tweaking the hotkeys/shortcuts a little bit a perfect keyboard driven experience

So far the only 'downsides' I have with Xfce 4.18 is the lack of Wayland support (AFAIK coming with 4.20), the Terminal does not resize the text area if you add new tabs (easily fixed by configuring it to always show the tab bar in the terminalrc) and the type-ahead launchers (whisker-menu, xfce4-appfinder) are 'weaker' than the type-ahead launchers in Gnome/KDE.

Big shout out to the Xfce developers for this excellent desktop environment!

tl;dr: If you haven't used Xfce for some time, give Xfce 4.18 or later a try, you might like it.

Found on hacker news.

Sorry, new to Lemmy - [email protected]

Back then I played Warcraft 3 ladder games and I hit my skill ceiling quite fast because my micro was simply too bad/slow. I still very much enjoy real time strategy games. Is there any real time strategy game that is played competitively with an active community where micro is not that essential? (Ruling out Star Craft 2.) Besides real time strategy games, what other games are out there being played competitive with an active community and where clicks-per-second are not too important?