Its quick and easy to install a flatpak which is the latest stable which is a godsend when the versions available through package manager are years out of date. Not everyone can compile from source or add an additional source repo. My only big issue is how bloated flatpaks are size wise and where stuff gets installed in my file system.
The biggest concern is how much ram and how fast a processor of the older computer. Most modern distros use about a gig of ram on startup and prefer a processor made in the last 20 years. If your computer has 500mb ram and a single core 1ghz pentium its gonna choke trying to run linux mint.
Instead certain Linux distributions are specifically tailored to work on extremely old and underpowered computers such as puppy Linux. These are modern distributions with updated kernels but are extremely minimalist in nature.
Sorry for not being able to offer insightful feedback. This caused me to look up current prices for 500GB spinning disks and holy shit. Something that used to be barely attainable (for me, then) is so cheap now that I said, “holy shit,” out loud.
I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it’s still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren’t permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).
Raid 0 on 3x500GB triples your failure rate (especially important on older drives, as I presume these are), and still won’t get anywhere near an SSD in speed.
You could just mount the 3 drives separately and have storage that way, which means if one fails you’ve still got the data on the other two… it’d still suck but not as bad as losing everything.
If it was me I’d wait until I could afford the SSD… it’ll be many times faster and newer.
I will only use it for game data. I highly value my personal data so I wont put anything remote to worthy in it, I have nas, separate drive, and even Google Drive. If it fails, the worst thing that will happen is I need to redownload all my games from Steam. It will be a bummer, but I think I should be able to restore the first game in matter of hours. My save data will be saved on Steam anyway.
Yeah, single hdd is only around 150mbps, not bad, but I saw 4 hdd can get to 600mbps, which is in realm of sata ssd. I’m just thinking to giving a shot, beside it’s only $20. If one fail, I still have 1tb.
Sequential speeds aren’t the only metric for storage performance though. Random reads are quite important and the HDDs will literally be hundreds of times slower than an SSD for random reads. It may be fine for older games if you’re fine with waiting for a minute at each loading screen, but some modern games now require SSDs and that number will likely skyrocket soon.
This is what I do. I have a massive old-school hard drive and I use it for things like Rimworld or various indie games. It's honestly manageable for some more-demanding stuff, but if I try to run anything intensive, I might as well not play it, at all. The old-school drive is great for anything Steamdeck level or below, basically.
agreed. games read a lot of random data. performance won't be nearly as 'good' as op expects.
the difference of $50 matters that much for op, i think that not spending anything would be the more prudent choice.
that said, if it were me i'd raid-0 two of them and keep the third as a single drop-in replacement for when that array dies; containing a full backup of the array's contents kept up-to-date with every major patch the games on it gets.
Yeah, I’m mega broke right now, lol. For reference, $50 for average people is around 8 days worth of salary here. And I’m unfortunately, an average people.
In that case a 3 drive RAID-5 is what you want. One drive dies you lose nothing but redundancy. You still get two drives with of data along with parity checking. It isn’t quite as fast as a zero, depending on hardware (most will max the HDD speed before being bottlenecks). Nothing will be as fast for random reads as an SSD or NVME, but you get the storage and piece of mind.
That RAID would be the separate disks. I surely wont use it to be my / or /home disks, it’s too risky. 3x500mb should give me theoretically 300-400mbps of sequential read/write.
If your laptop periodically freezes, switching distros won’t fix it.
Identifying the underlying issue (which is most likely a hardware defect) would be a better use of your time.
Your first step would be to try and reproduce the issue. See under what circumstances it happens. See if it happens from a live USB or only from your installed system (If it does, this eliminates the SSD as most probable culprit). Do a RAM test. Then ask for help with further trouble-shooting.
I’ve spoken to another user who has the same issue as me and they made a couple suggestions including disabling certain options in BIOS or trying a distribution with a newer kernel.
At first I thought it was issues with iGPU and dGPU switching but I’m beginning to suspect that’s not the case.
Reproducing when it freezes is a challenge because it’s very inconsistent and does not leave and crash reports.
The only improvement I’ve seen yet is switching from Linux Mint 21.2 to LMDE 6 but the kernel is still older compared to the versions that I was suggested for my hardware.
I would like to try a newer kernel just for the sake of trying.
I feel you. The bugs that get the machine to crash and you have zero chance of getting any useful debug information, are by far the most annoying ones.
In my experience it’s most of the time some driver issues in the kernel or the (NVidia) proprietary drivers. Or an hardware issue. On Debian I can install several kernel versions alongside each other. So there would be no need for me to install more than one distribution. Most of the times a proper crash isn’t caused by the userspace anyways, so it boils down to the different kernel versions and configurations anyways. You could also try an older kernel.
On my debian machine something like journalctl -b 1 -k shows stuff. There’s also lots of debug files in /var/log/ like boot.logdebug, kern.log, messages, syslog.
But it somehow needs to be able to store the log on your disk. If the system craps out completely, it won’t get written to disk. The magic SysRequest keys might help if it only freezes. I learned “Raising elephants is so utterly boring.” You might wanna goggle that and learn how to do it.
Other than that, I mostly look at all logs (no ‘-b1’ and search for the place where it rebooted. Sometimes you find other related stuff while scrolling. But my own (old) thinkpad doesn’t ever crash.
I think there are other crash-dump tools available. It believe there’s something called ‘kdump-tools’ available on Debian. YMMV.
I have an AMD + AMD setup but apparently the Dell G5 series has issues with linux so it’s been an uphill challenge.
I did see that LMDE 6 makes it easy to boot different kernels at startup which is handy. I tried looking at Liquorix Kernel but I don’t think it’s ready for LMDE 6 just yet. I can’t recall exactly why but I got a big nope when trying to download it. I think I tried looking at the Zen Kernel as well but couldn’t figure out if it’s just for Arch or if it’s compatible with Debian.
Too much to learn and now enough hours or attention span. Slow progress but I guess it’s a thing to do besides watching my plants grow.
pages like this also suggest things like updating the BIOS and the graphics card firmware with some AMD tool. And I’ve read several times you should try the kernel parameter amdgpu.runpm=0
Make sure to do all of that first. And observe if the freezes happen in certain circumstances. Maybe you can deduct something from that. Maybe it happens while gaming (GPU). Or when under load. Or if you move it around (loose connection), or when hot or after a certain time even if idle. Disable power management and see if that helps. Should be less effort than installing 5 operating systems. (If the crash isn’t super rare) And try using the magic SysReq keys to force linux to sync and reboot to see if the kernel is still alive somehow.
Fortunately I updated my BIOS from windows before switching to Linux and as of recently, I still have the latest version.
I added amdgpu.runpm=0 and that did increase stability considerably. My system froze up way less often which was great.
I also found that adding processor.max_cstate=1 has made my system even more stable and I haven’t had a freeze up in days now. This page gives a nice run down of what it does.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a freeze up in the future but overall my system has been a lot more stable making everything far more enjoyable.
Maybe just start with the different versions available in your distro’s package manager. I’ve never downloaded a custom kernel from somewhere else. (Well, I have but that was embedded stuff and not a desktop computer.)
The desktop is finally catching up with the more restrictive permissions model where an app doesn’t just have the ability to do anything the user can do but instead only has access to what it needs.
Going with a familiar interface style like the ones people already use on mobile just makes sense.
I’m not a fan of all the blank space in their design language, it doesn’t look bad or anything but I don’t have a touch screen and having to move the mouse around so much for long periods of time physically hurts, especially on laptops.
I wish it was more… desktop friendly… If they took more advantage of the dynamic layout capabilities of GTK4 to have a better desktop layout based on their already existing design language while still having this mobile esk layout for other devices, we’d be golden.
If they don’t want to do that, they should at least increase the default mouse speed so it feels better out of the box.
Haha so true, and I say this as a Linux user for like 20 years. There are some Linux users who value functionality over form so much that they prefer cluttered user interfaces with tiny borders to maximize screen space.
I’m not experienced enough with linux to understand if this is a question or a statement on what I can do. In either case, I don’t know how to interpret what this means.
They are confirming that, yes, it is an option to have a partition dedicated to just the user’s (your) home environment and folders
and
asking if that is an option that appeals to you or you have already considered.
It is what I prefer, but there are people who have good reason to not like that. It’s worth trying out imo, and later if you find that it doesn’t suit you, that’s okay, you’ll just need to find another solution
I find it annoying to worry about multiple partition sizes. Having to make sure your root and home partition are sized correctly is one more thing to think about.
That makes sense. I guess for my case it’s fine since I have more storage than I can use. Additionally, I keep my most important data on multiple offline storages and even that is quite minimal.
When installing Linux, you first have to partition your hard drive.
You can create a seperate partition for your /home folder in addition to the one you create for the rest of the system.
Then when you install a different distro, you can tell the installer to use your /home partition without changing or formatting it. After installation, you will have the new Linux system and the /home folder from your old one. That way, all user settings and flatpak settings will be the same as before reinstalling.
But if you’re a new Linux user, I don’t know how helpful this is. It’s easier to just copy everything in /home to an external drive, then copy it back after you reinstalled, for the same effect.
That first bit makes sense, I should be able to figure that out I think.
The reason I want to avoid using an external drive is because it takes a minimum an hour to transfer 4 games worth of data currently. That time is an inhibiting factor for me. I’d like to minimize downtime.
Also I’d like to test gaming oriented distributions with newer kernels compared to what Linux Mint ships with.
Additionally, ensure that flatpaks are installed within that home partition. Some distros (like Fedora) default to installing flatpaks system-wide (and thus flatpaks end up being installed in /var instead). So, after ensuring that your home folder is correctly found within the home partition, just install flatpaks with the flatpak install --user *package-name* command.
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