As Arch seemingly explodes in popularity I’m afraid we’ll start seeing more of this.
Citation needed.
I'm not sure that's true. Neither I nor most people I know who use Arch (granted, most of them are professional software developers) install software from the internet willy-nilly and without reviewing anything, if by AUR or "curl | bash", especially when on their main computers.
Archlinux is a distro that’s designed for the user to control their own system, and the AUR is clear about what it is and the nature of the packages in it.
> Warning: AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.
This is from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository.
> Warning: AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux. You should become familiar with the manual build process in order to be prepared to troubleshoot problems.
This is from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers.
"yay" is one of the most common AUR helpers, it requires two confirmations from what I counted. One of them is to inspect the PKGBUILD file, the other one is just to proceed.
But, maybe it would be best not to have “yay” available. Using something like AUR without reading the package build files is… pretty bad, right? And it is bad for the community, because if there is a convention of doing that sort of thing, it makes the AUR a good target for attacking.
Yay itself is in the AUR. You have to go out of your way to install it.
The Archlinux docs on AUR helpers lead with a red warning: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers
I don't remember how yay works but paru (another AUR package manager) displays the pkgbuild file before it will install.
Even if you're using an immutable distro, your KDE Plasma session can get hijacked if you simply use the built in wizard to install 3rd party desktop widgets, which is a right-click + single-click away on any Plasma destkop.
Also anyone who wants to try "Gaming on Linux" needs bleeding edge kernel which is Arch's default setup compared to other distros.
1) do you want an intermediary between you and the upstream? for example, to patch out telemetry
2) is it important that what you're using continues to work the same way so you can focus on your actual work?
No answer to either is consequence-free, e.g. for 1), see the Debian SSH patch event, or for 2), if the answer is "it doesn't work", then that kinda forces one's hand.
The "everything changing all at once" thing is what eventually drove me to arch (as the most popular at the time rolling release distro - and more stable at the time than debian sid), I'd personally rather have smaller breaking changes more frequently. Though it's probably less painful now to update debian versions than it use to be because things generally work better without configuration than they used to.
I love Arch Linux, but please...
(Arch Linux is already "fast" (depends on what you install for your DE, if any) and customizable.)
Gentoo with make.conf (/etc/portage/make.conf[1]) having "CFLAGS="-O3 -march=native -flto"" means that Gentoo, a Linux distribution, is performant?
[1] It is not a good idea to build everything with LTO or PGO enabled because not all packages support LTO / PGO cleanly. Do it on the basis of per-package.
For me it feels blazingly fast, even on obsolete KabyLake Core-I5/7(t) forcibly clocked down to about 800Mhz most of the times :)
It fucking flies without much effort. On modern systems even more so. While being rock solid. Without any crashes. Even under Plasma. When I'm reading about bugfixes regarding crashes under Plasma I just shrug and think "Waddya talkin about?". That may be hardware dependent, though, because they are old Lenovo Thinkcentres(1Litre SFF M910q tiny) with excellent firmware.
Using btrfs, profile-sync-demon, zram(Yes. Even with 32GB Ram!). Suspend/Resume working every single time. No glitches, hick-ups, ever. So far. Since 10th of June, 2024.
Edit: Almost always some music out of yt doodling in some bg-tab, in oh-so-slow FF, without any clicks, stuttering, or other breaks.
No need for yt-dlp, mpv at all. Except for dl/saving stuff, sometimes. While FF is rarely under 100 tabs.
My i3 with vim / emacs and even VSCodium flies too, on X Linux. :P
The browser is always the slowest in my case and this has always been my experience, and unfortunately it still is.
Sideberry (Tree-Style-Tabs like extension) was the ugliest offender there. Though that may have been me misconfiguring it. OTOH I didn't manage to find settings where it didn't do that, and still looked like I wanted it to. At that time, maybe a year ago, I've thought of it as potential 'instant ssd-killer'. Couldn't be bothered. Deinstalled. Now FF has some basic version of vertical tabs by Mozilla itself. It suffices(for now).
As for tabs, I like the way Vivaldi does it and allows me to customize.
By "Not even insane amounts of RAM, it usually takes about 4 to 5GB, rarely going to 8, then shrinking back a while after closing too much tabs." I meant to say that this applies to the resident size in RAM of the whole browser, not what PSD does, or adds. That would be just what your browser profile is using 'on disk'. Peanuts, so to speak.
With only 8GB it's really hard to tell. It depends on your usage patterns.
First, regarding just PSD, it relies on RuntimeDirectorySize= of https://man.archlinux.org/man/logind.conf.5 which by default is limited to use up to 10% of system memory, but not statically reserved, only "on demand".
Which in turn relies on tmpfs which can use up to half of system RAM by default. Again, on demand only, not statically reserved.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Tmpfs https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Tmpfs
However, I think these are the wrong knobs to turn :-)
PSD can make use of overlayfs, which saves a little bit of used RAM, and is faster to initially sync, but uses more disk space then. But not that much. Which can be further minimized by the number of kept profile backups, or not using backups at all.
Just keep your profile lean and mean, then there's less stuff to shuffle around. Since your'e using Vivaldi, pointing you to wikipages how to make Firefox use less RAM seems pointless ;)
Maybe (carefully) use something like https://www.bleachbit.org for cleaning up Vivalidis profile.
Which leaves things like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zram https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...
OR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zswap https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/zswap.html
to consider.
While it may seem insane to reserve already limited RAM for just another thing, these are worth it. If configured right. I used them, or their predecessors since olden times, when I've just had a Thinkpad T60p with some Centrino and only 4GB.
That made things better in general. Of course it's no silver bullet for everything, but it made the system less sluggish, and it took longer to slow down because of being 'swapped to death'.
From then on I continued to use stuff like that.
On a system with only 8GB, too. ZRAM in this case, because backing device like zswap was impossible, because the HDD blew. So I booted live from USB(2(Arrgh!)) and ran from RAM.
By means of AntiX, which btw. showed my the ways sysctls regarding swappiness, pressure stall information, and related stuff can totally change the behaviour of a system.
Even if it looks strange/ghettoish at first, which can be remastered away easily anyways, the devs really know how to get the most out of older systems with limited RAM and power, in interesting ways. Should be looked at, even if only for 'inspiration', technically.
For instance making things like Firefox shrink back, after having closed too much tabs. And remaining usable, while doing so.
Anyway. Depending on what you do, 8GB only can go a looong way, if configured/used right.
IMO not using ZRAM/ZSWAP, sysctls for swappiness, PSI, etc. is wrong and wasteful.
PSD is just a little icing on the cake.
Where measure can be anything from htop/atop over https://github.com/cdown/psi-notify , to https://github.com/noiseonwires/memory-pressure and so on.
To understand what these sysctls are about, how they are related to each other, and to ZRAM, I'd recommend reading, or at least skimming https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html , https://chrisdown.name/2019/07/18/linux-memory-management-at... , https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swa... , https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swa... , https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-no-swap-space , https://linuxblog.io/running-out-of-ram-linux-add-zram , https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/899 , https://lonesysadmin.net/2013/12/22/better-linux-disk-cachin... , https://github.com/CachyOS/CachyOS-Settings/pull/19 , https://github.com/CachyOS/CachyOS-Settings , https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.html , https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html , https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/psi/docs/overview , https://unixism.net/2019/08/linux-pressure-stall-information...
even if it seems redundant, OFC skim and discard anything you already know(But I can't know that).
The following not to use them, but for their POVs/concepts regarding the same problem: https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd , https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom , https://github.com/hakavlad/nohang
These, to maybe take inspiration from, to adjust dynamically:
https://www.linuxbash.sh/post/tune-vmswappiness-in-a-script-... , https://github.com/lululoid/LMKD-PSI-Activator (Yes, Android, I know, but still...)
Then there is the whole thing about eBPF, which opens up much more screws to turn dynamically according to demand, according to whichever policies.
https://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html / https://deepwiki.com/oracle/bpftune/1-overview
Have fun :)
The "CachyOS" page was deleted[1], and replaced with a redirect to the Arch Linux page. But CachyOS is not mentioned anywhere on that page, nor on the "List of Linux distributions § Arch Linux-based" page.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
There are a lot of derivative(I don't mean it in a negative way) distors out there, not sure if they all need pages.
There is a reason Ubuntu is usually the first distro new Linux users go to. For almost a decade now, installing a feature-complete Ubuntu setup is not much more difficult than reimaging Windows.
Personally I've been running Arch on my work machine for a few years now with very few issues. I'm not even very consistent with updates, and probably run them about once every 3 weeks on average. I have only had to manually intervene on a handful of occasions.
I like it a lot because everything is always up-to-date. I don't face any issues with unsupported versions for tools like I have with Debian in the past. The rolling release model also saves me the pain of doing a "hard" OS upgrade, which often come with issues.
Eventually, I got more busy and had less time to tinker, so I migrated to Ubuntu LTS, which has some small warts, but has needed practically null babysitting compared to Arch. I was surprised when the Arch memes resurfaced this year, but that's the only growth I've seen. None of my Linux-savvy peers use Arch, BTW.
I've had way more problems with Ubuntu trying to be convenient and bringing in lots of Windows-style automation that breaks more often than it works (and when that happens, you're really on your own since you have no idea how it's put together — just like in Windows).
Or even just bugs that were solved upstream ages ago (and have been available in every rolling-release distribution, including Debian testing/sid).
The current Arch installer suggests btrfs with snapper, so you get automatic snapshots pretty much out of the box (need to check one flag in installer), and can easily rollback if something breaks. Not something I needed, but it's there.
At least this guy has been using it as a daily driver (at home and at work) for at least fifteen years.
I switched away from Arch (to Ubuntu) as a sort of side effect of switching computers a couple years ago (desktop->laptop, though Ubuntu would “bring the batteries along” more conveniently). Ubuntu is fine I guess, but I really miss the stability of rolling release and the user-friendliness of not having too many built in programs.
Then had to use something 'officially' supported for a while, then did some Debian derivative live-distro running from USB/in RAM because of HW-problems, and settled for CachyOS when new (old) HW arrived.
I update maybe once a month at the most, more likely every two monts, because I don't give a shit. With the exception of FF, or maybe some nicer Kernel, for eBPF and scheduler-stuff.
That's reviewing changes in a few config files, after having read up about them at Archs & CachyOS sites. Maybe five minutes max, opening a few relevant tabs. (If necessary at all, which often isn't the case.)
Starting Pacman. Downloads instantly, even if several GB. Decompresses and installs stuff. Maybe two to three minutes. Reboot. 20 seconds. Plasma is back.
Clicking FF. Back with all its tabs. Maybe two to three seconds. Maybe uBO blocks a few more secs sometimes, while updating lists.
After intentionally having killed it with -9 in preparation before reboot.
Cleaning Pacman's package-cache and btrfs-snapshots because The only way is Fooorwaaard!
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_tVzx_PIH8 Daxon ft. Numa - The Only Way (Extended Mix) [COLDHARBOUR RECORDINGS] 7mins, 7secs )
Letting btrfs rebalance in the background.
Opening other stuff, on other virtual desktops, being exactly where and how I left it, thanks to working session-mgmt.
Feels very convenient to me, in opposition to most of the other 'mainstream stuff'.
Maybe the memes have a core of truth to them? For ppl who know what they do?
Cachy, Cachy, Caramba, Yay, Yay!