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 2 years 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.

137

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.