overview for 7ai

Hi buddy 👋🏾 Same here mostly. I have given up on expecting anything out of life. I moved to a tribal village and am enjoying my remaining days there in nature.

20gb ram, 10gb zram, 10gb swap, default values. What should I change? in c/linux@lemmy.ml

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Zram is basically a compressed swap device located in your ram. You can check the usage by running zramctl.

I would recommend setting mem_limit to 10 GB or disk_size to 40GB and algorithm to lz4.

https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config#example-configuration

20gb ram, 10gb zram, 10gb swap, default values. What should I change? in c/linux@lemmy.ml

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Zram usually has a very high compression ratio - around 4:1 for lz4 and 6:1 for zstd. You can set zram to 40-50 GB. It will still use less than 1/2 of your ram.

Zram has an option to write poorly compressible data to the disk instead of storing it in the ram. I would split the swap partition - 3 GB for zram writeback and rest for ordinary swap.

I switched from Nixos to void Linux. Here's my experience so far. in c/linux@lemmy.ml

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it's data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it's hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It'll download all packages again even though there's minimal change.

138

I switched from Nixos to void Linux. Here's my experience so far. (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by 7ai@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml

71 comments fedilink

I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I'm happy with it so far.

Why did I switch?

Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it'll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.
Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it's around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.

Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?

Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.
Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It's harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn't a big issue for me most of the time.)

For now, I'll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.

My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it's probably not suitable for most.