fell

joined 9 months ago
[–] fell@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 4 days ago (44 children)

A true mainstream Linux distro would need guidelines like this:

  • The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.
  • The user is never be expected to edit a configuration file.
  • There is a graphical UI for every possible action the user might want to (or have to) do.

This especially includes:

  • Configuring audio devices
  • Installing graphics drivers
  • Updating the operating system
  • Managing applications and storage space
  • Connecting to networked storage
  • Adjusting kernel parameters (This is neccessary on certain hardware, yet, barely any distro has a graphical UI for it.)

The only distro that comes close to this is Linux Mint, but not even Mint covers everything I just mentioned.

If we want Linux to succeed, there needs to be at least one distro that confidently ships without a terminal.

[–] fell@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I convinced my wife to dual booting Linux Mint. She uses it every now and then, but she primarily still uses Windows 10. I hope she will abandon it once she sees this. She absolutely detests ads of any kind.

[–] fell@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 months ago

Thank you all for your ideas, I managed to solve the problem. It was somewhat hardware related, but not really.

I was using BTRFS, which creates a lot of write amplification and aged SSDs don't handle that well. According to a study from 2017, btrfs can cause up to 32x write amplification, absolutely hammering its performance: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1707.08514

I converted my system to RAID0 using EXT4 and the stutters and freezes are gone.

22
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by fell@discuss.tchncs.de to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social
 

I have a few dodgy cheap SSDs, so I'm not surprised by slow I/O performance in general. But my Plasma desktop frequently freezes for 1-3 seconds (including the cursor!) whenever there is high IO load, for example while installing a Steam game.

Updating the screen should be completely independent from I/O, shouldn't it? Is there anything I could've misconfigured in my Arch Linux? I'm running Plasma 6.1.4 in Wayland.

[–] fell@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 9 months ago

Try searching it on https://btdig.com/, a DHT search engine. Most of the torrents there are very old and have barely any seeds. Be patient. The last thing I downloaded from there took 1-2 weeks to complete.

[–] fell@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 9 months ago

That's what I do. I seed for as long as it remains on disk.