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Should I not switch from Arch to Gentoo w/ laptop hardware?
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bytex
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 9:04 am    Post subject: Should I not switch from Arch to Gentoo w/ laptop hardware? Reply with quote

The lightness of the init software. Things like customization what draws me to Gentoo but Since I only have 240GB of NVMe as storage, I was a bit skeptical about the installation.
Does constantly installing software from source with a lot of R/Ws shorten the life of SSD? Should I use regular HDD instead as main storage?

is there a tool to make my own gentoo iso?
once I tried to install Gentoo base before. It was a bit complicated or I left it half-done because of urgency. Now I wanna work on my custom gentoo base ISO on VM first

this laptop's hardware tell me your opinions if gentoo is not suitable for me. What about disadvantages of using Gentoo compared to arch linux?
right now the file system is out of control, I will certainly do a new fresh install and I was just re-thinking of using Gentoo..
Code:
       
[archlinux@net ~]$ neofetch
                   -`                    archlinux@net
                  .o+`                   -------------
                 `ooo/                   OS: Arch Linux x86_64
                `+oooo:                  Host: VivoBook_ASUSLaptop X509JB_X509J
               `+oooooo:                 Kernel: 6.11.3-arch1-1
               -+oooooo+:                Uptime: 1 hour, 12 mins
             `/:-:++oooo+:               Packages: 1266 (pacman), 7 (flatpak)
            `/++++/+++++++:              Shell: bash 5.2.37
           `/++++++++++++++:             Resolution: 1366x768
          `/+++ooooooooooooo/`           WM: awesome
         ./ooosssso++osssssso+`          Theme: Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3]
        .oossssso-````/ossssss+`         Icons: Tela-light [GTK2/3]
       -osssssso.      :ssssssso.        Terminal: xterm
      :osssssss/        osssso+++.       CPU: Intel i5-1035G1 (8) @ 3.600GHz
     /ossssssss/        +ssssooo/-       GPU: Intel Iris Plus Graphics G1
   `/ossssso+/:-        -:/+osssso+-     GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX110
  `+sso+:-`                 `.-/+oso:    Memory: 2620MiB / 3723MiB
 `++:.                           `-/+/
 .`                                 `/                           
                                                                 
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Banana
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 9:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Does constantly installing software from source with a lot of R/Ws shorten the life of SSD? Should I use regular HDD instead as main storage?

No. Please do use HDD only for long term storage and things you do not need often. HDD are not invalid but for daily usage not update to date.

There is a topic about the ssd lifetime https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1108188-start-0.html and even a wikipage https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SSD. In short: SSDs are fine for daily and havy work. (Special usecases may differ, but then you know why)

Quote:
this laptop's hardware

Does this only have 3GB RAM?

Basically you can install Gentoo on it, but building should be done on another system https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1017330-start-0.html. Gentoo binary https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Binary_Host_Quickstart could solve this, but you loose some individuality
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sMueggli
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 9:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why do you fear that a SSD is dying too early? How do you calculate the lifetime of a SSD?

Every part of your laptop can fail at any time.

Gentoo allows you to work-around nearly every problem. Building Gentoo on your laptop will probably not be a lot of fun in the long term.
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bytex
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 10:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Alright thanks for links, this has only 4gb ram. it says portage can write to the RAM only (with tmpfs support) and never to ssd. would I be totally exempt from writes to the disk?
*Increase my RAM amount to 16gb and let Portage use some of it and the system use the rest.
*I'm not who uses a desktop environment anyway + Getting rid of system-d also reduce some of RAM usage.
In short, how much ram is relatievely good for when using with tmpfs?
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bytex
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 10:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

sMueggli wrote:
Why do you fear that a SSD is dying too early? How do you calculate the lifetime of a SSD?

Every part of your laptop can fail at any time.

Gentoo allows you to work-around nearly every problem. Building Gentoo on your laptop will probably not be a lot of fun in the long term.


i'm saying building from source instead of binary based system like Arch = more writes to the SSD
In theory, this is the case. In practice, people who have used this distro for a long time will know better.


from gentoo/SSD wiki page

Quote:
Slowing wear out
Each write operation performed on a NAND flash cell causes its wear. This fact limits the SSD lifespan. The cell endurance varies with used technology[6]. On the other hand, read operations are straightforward and do not cause cell wear.

A basic method increasing SSD lifespan is to uniformly distribute writes across all the blocks. This method is called wear leveling and is deployed via SSD firmware.

From system point of view, it is appropriate to generally reduce amount of writes.
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Hu
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 11:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

A tmpfs will avoid unnecessarily writing intermediate results to disk, yes. The right size for a tmpfs is for it to be big enough for everything you want to put in it. If you make it smaller, you will be unable to use it for big builds, and those are the ones most likely to take long enough that their intermediate results spill to disk. If you use a lean system (no DE, minimal GUI), you can get by with a fairly small tmpfs. Making the tmpfs too big at mount time is harmless, as it only uses RAM for what is actually stored. However, if you make it too big and then try to fill it, you could run out of memory.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 12:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My 250G SSD from 2012 has an expected write life of 180 years.
it's already too small.

I don't expect to be using that SSD in 180 years fbr several reasons :), so it's write life is not a problem to me.

QLC SSDs should be avoided if possible.
They are still new tech. Never buy version 1.0 of anything.
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flysideways
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 12:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Building in a tmpfs used to be a large performance boost when using spinning disk hard drives. Now, with M2 SSD drives there is not much of a reduction in time spent on an emerge. It does move some writes off of the SSD.

If this is correctly your laptop, https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/asus/x509jb , Crucial says it will accept a 16GB module. Apparently there is also 4GB soldered onboard.

I am impressed with the manufacturers that supply service manuals to the end users. https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/Customer_self_repair_guide/X509JB_Customer_Self_Repair_Guide_20210709.pdf?model=X509JB

It looks like both the memory and M2 SSD are upgradable on that laptop.

Currently, most packages take less than 2GB per thread to emerge, there are some that use a bit more than 2GB per thread.

There is guidance in the wiki on creating per-package solutions to the individual, large resource needing, packages.
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Goverp
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 3:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Don't forget that building in a tmpfs will reduce your systems memory available to the compiler. If, say, you want to compile qtwebengine, you need every available byte! AFAIR Libreoffice is another build-time memory hog. If you want to compile either of these you may need too much of your memory dedicated to tmpfs for the source unpack phase of the ebuild to leave enough for the actual compilation!

You can get more mileage with compressed tmpfs - see the wiki article on zram.
The same can also be true of swap space if you use zswap (wiki article), which can reduce SSD I/O rates but again at the cost of memory available to portage. There's some clever balancing to be done here.

For similar reasons, I avoid "-pipe" in my CFLAGS.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 10:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is no reason to avoid -pipe on memory constrained systems.
It gives gcc permission to -pipe temporaray files between phases. It's not a command.
When there is not enough RAM, these files will go to disk anyway.
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rfx
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 5:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you are worried about your laptop hardware because of compiling, you can also use the binary project from Gentoo
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 9:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

NeddySeagoon wrote:
There is no reason to avoid -pipe on memory constrained systems.
It gives gcc permission to -pipe temporaray files between phases. It's not a command.
When there is not enough RAM, these files will go to disk anyway.

I live and learn. Thanks.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 2:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Goverp wrote:
NeddySeagoon wrote:
There is no reason to avoid -pipe on memory constrained systems.
It gives gcc permission to -pipe temporaray files between phases. It's not a command.
When there is not enough RAM, these files will go to disk anyway.

I live and learn. Thanks.
I suggest set TMPDIR if you wish to not use "-pipe".
I think GCC put these stage file in /tmp if TMPDIR is not set and since this thread is also about SSD usage so one may want to review where to put those GCC stage files.
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