Should I not switch from Arch to Gentoo w/ laptop hardware?

bytex · n00b Joined: 30 Jun 2024 Posts: 5

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..

Banana · Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 9:13 am Post subject:

sMueggli · Guru Joined: 03 Sep 2022 Posts: 456

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.

bytex · n00b Joined: 30 Jun 2024 Posts: 5

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?

bytex · n00b Joined: 30 Jun 2024 Posts: 5

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22546

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.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 12:29 pm Post subject:

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.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

flysideways · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 486

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.

Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2152

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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Greybeard