The issue with many of those distros is that it usually means that you have to install everything from 0.
Arch is good at this because the archinstall script speeds it up and you don't have to choose a DE. But with other distros that use a graphical installer, you are forced to use whatever they ship as the default desktop environment.
edit: And holy shit properly configuring Btrfs subvolumes from 0 is something that I tried with voidlinux and I ended up breaking the entire install.
It is just that zram is much faster than zswap because it uses the ram to store compressed memory. Android already uses it by default.
These are worth reading:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/mzun99/new_zram_tuning_benchmarks/ https://linuxreviews.org/The_Benefits_Of_Having_A_Compressed_zram_Swap_Device_On_Linux
alias totally works, but if you want to simplify it for multiple package managers then it is better to use a script.
Like this example that when the user types pkginstall vim, pkginstall would be a script in path that would do the operation regarless of the package manager:
# Install with 'pacman' (if available)
if command -v pacman >/dev/null 2>&1; then
sudo pacman -S $@ || exit 1
fi
# Install with 'apt' (if available)
if command -v apt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
sudo apt install $@ || exit 1
fi
# Install with 'dnf' (if available)
if command -v dnf >/dev/null 2>&1; then
sudo dnf install $@ || exit 1
fi
They could even install it in their ~/.local/bin, and as long as their distro makes that part of PATH (which arch does not kek) by just using that same home with another distro they already could install/remove packages and update using those wrapper scripts regardless of the distro.
If you are wondering why the script needs to check if the package manager exists, it is because when testing it I discovered that if the first one is not installed it will cancel the operation and not continue, and if I remove the exit 1 it will attempt to use the next package manager when canceling the operation with ctrl+c.
Oh I totally agree with that. But I don't think the regular a new user should be using CLI tools to install packages. There are plenty of GUI tools that should be doing that for you instead.
And if they did, it should be very simplified with a wrapper script like in the example above, iirc the common command update-grub is a wrapper script that simplifies it, it is a shame this isn't more common with other tasks.
This could be even standardized, like regardless of the distro if you type installpkg vim, the installpkg script would do something like this that will run it thru the most popular packages managers to do the simple operation:
# Install with 'pacman' (if available)
if command -v pacman >/dev/null 2>&1; then
sudo pacman -S $@ || exit 1
fi
# Install with 'apt' (if available)
if command -v apt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
sudo apt install $@ || exit 1
fi
# Install with 'dnf' (if available)
if command -v dnf >/dev/null 2>&1; then
sudo dnf install $@ || exit 1
fi
echo "No package manager found"
You can use an alias for that. Or even a wrapper script that intercepts that.
For example you could place this script in your PATH named idk mmm installpkg (install might be an issue for a name)
Which would do the following:
#!/bin/sh
sudo pacman -S $@
So when you type installpkg vim it will run sudo pacman -S vim
You can repeat that for pacman -Syu, pacman -Rsn, etc. You can even replace pacman for your aur helper instead. (remove the sudo if you will use an aur helper instead).
Some defaults I would like to see:
Have zsh as the interactive shell (And also have its dotfiles in a better location like XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh)
Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set. (Maybe also timeshift installed, not sure because not everyone uses timeshift for btrfs snapshots).
ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).
Pacman as the package manager with an Aur helper already installed.
No bloat™ preinstalled, nothing of shipping flatpak or snap by default or even a DE. So I can just boot into a tty without having to do the minimal install from zero.
Comply with the FHS and XDG specs (Arch fucking installs packages to /opt and doesnt set ~/.local/bin as part of PATH)
Dont break userspace (arch did this recently with an update to glibc that removed a patch that breaks steam games)
Edit: Also forgot to mention:
This is common on the cheap X79 and X99 motherboard combos being sold in aliexpress, they even add nvme support.
Sway can't set my 3 displays as extended like I can with i3 with xorg.
Also I recently wanted to try to record on OBS with sway to rule out an issue that I have with my AMD card with colors, and I wasn't able to get OBS to work, installed xdg-desktop-portal-wlr, set the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway environment variable and didn't work.
Also for some reason my xfce4 apps are ignoring my xdg base dir variables (I have config and cache inside ~/.local) when using either sway or hyprland and that results in issues with my theming and the creation of the .config and .cache dirs in home again, what is weird is that it only happens with the xfce apps.
EDIT: I was able to test OBS on hyprland instead of sway and the issue with the colors is still present even on wayland.
You can use a wrapper script on PATH that launches the app in a fake home wherever you want.
Flatpak itself violates the xdg base dir spec by making ~/.var
Oh I did try to use the AMF driver, my first attempt ended with i3 crashing upon startup. What was worse is that even after removing those drivers and putting mesa back it still crashed on startup, good thing I had a btrfs snapshot before messing with that.
My second attempt I was able to use the AMF on OBS, but it still failed to record the 3 displays.
My biggest issue right now is the issue with the colors, I don't care if I have to use the cpu to record at this point.
Doesn't timeshift work? If you installed fedora with Btrfs which is the default it should work unless the default subvolumes used by fedora are not compatible with what timeshift expects.
Sorry if you meant to say that they should have it by default and you are already using timeshift.