User:Jl2

From ArchWiki

Hi! this is my user page.

About me

General

  • I like to: biking, tennis, baking+cooking, doing some hacky stuff and listening to music
  • I don't like: spinach, some tough sports (e.g. swimming over 300m), Broken Windows OS
  • My favourite food: Lasagne
  • The music I listen to: Metal, occasionally phonk

Setup

  • Machine: lenovo yoga 7 gen 7 (Laptop; AMD ryzen 7 6800u; 16 GB; 2.2K@60 14 Inch IPS screen)
  • OS: dualboot windows and Linux
  • DE: KDE with bismuth
  • DM: SDDM
  • Bootloader: systemd-boot with UKI images

Uptime/Contact

I Live near Zurich, so my time zone is CEST.

My uptime is between 6:30 and 8:30.

  • Email: janluca.oster@proton.me - Is up in the Morning when I didn't use up my screen time yet or if I occasionally look from my laptop.
  • IRC: you can occasionally find me under 'jl2' in the #AOT chat. mostly in the Afternoon.
  • I'm not sure but I guess you can write to me in the 'Discussion' Tab.


Stuff I think you need to know

Is Arch for you?

Easy answer: NO. it just isn't the right distro for most Users.

You may want to install Arch for these reasons:

  • customizeability: Arch is one of the most customizeable distro. Arch also doesn't have a default face like other distros for this reason.
  • rolling release: It has the fastest package distribution. Once a package has been updated, it is distributed.
  • No versions: It does not have a release cycle. theoretically Arch is still on v1.0 :)

and you must be willing to take these drawbacks:

  • Installing and configuring from the command line (Archinstall just isn't pure Arch; see this discussion). Be prepared to tune your system for hours after installing. Almost every other distro avoids this (Garuda is preconfigured nifty-looking Arch).
  • Breaks: Updates have a chance of breaking stuff. Use Ubuntu if you want a stable update system.

Great Stuff you need to Install

General

  • KDE: why not?
    • latte-dock: great docks
    • bismuth: configureable auto tiler. a little buggy, but automates your desktop
    • SDDM-git: bugless accesory to complete the expirience
    • A lot of the KDE Applications
  • cpupower: CPU frequency scaling done easy for scripting
  • micro: great terminal text editor. better than nano
  • paru: easy AUR management
  • EarlyOOM: a good, lightweight OOM killer
  • Firefox: A good, secure, feature-rich browser

Creative

  • Blender: free 3D creator. occasionnally crashes
  • GIMP: powerfull image manipulator
  • kdenlive: average video editor

Communications

  • Konversation: IRC channel
  • Thunderbird: configureable mail client

Zram vs Zswap

  • Zswap: compressed swap. needs a swap partition. always use this with a swap partition/file.
  • Zram: dynamic compressed swap in the Ramdisk. It only compresses RAM if it's low, so having it enabled even if you don't use it doesn't bother. Don't forget to disable Zswap when using this!

if we assume to have a compression level of 1:3:

RAM swap size/Zram disksize total/uncompressed total/compressed
16GB 10GB 26GB 46GB
16GB 16GB 16GB 48GB

So Zram is equivallent to 10GB of Swap (generally 2/3 of RAM) here.

Plus, Zram is faster than Zswap because writing things to disk is still slower than writing to RAM.

But normally, you don't need more than 8GB anyway, so mostly you don't need to compress anything except for the peaks. Depending how often you reach these, consider using a OOM killer (I recommend EarlyOOM).

Partitioning

  • As seen above, you may or may not need a swap partition.
  • /home is useless except if you often reinstall your OS.
  • the EFI partition does not need to be big. 250MB is mostly enough. If you want to minimize the size, then use UKI images and mount the EFI to /efi.
  • pereferably do not make too many small partitions. It's inefficient.

File systems

  • do not use BTRFS if you don't use the features. I'll probably add a backup section sometime.
  • ext4: generally good, has good features and low-level kernel support.
  • xfs: great performance and performance features.