Quazatron

You can have all the opinions you want. In the end, the ecosystem (Linux is an ecosystem, not an OS) evolves by people with different drives trying different things, some aspects are successful and are kept, some are developed for a while and dropped, some are brilliant but never reach critical mass.

It’s a somewhat chaotic mix of engineering and tinkering that ultimately works while embracing widely opposing opinions. This quirky nature provides it with strength and flexibility.

Bottom line: we need strong opinions and people who act on those opinions to build the vision they want.

Linux will run on a potato, and it doesn’t even have to have hardware memory management.

Turns out that you have to explicitly mount btrfs with the option compress=zstd (or compress=lzo as you prefer) to get any compression done, and I was not doing that. Also, to apply compression to existing data, you have to defragment with compression enabled. Alternatively, you can create a subvolume and set the compression property.

This explains it quite well.

I’ll be away for a while, but I’ll get some stats, because now I’m also curious.

My main goals are efficient space usage and portability, so I’ve never measured anything. I’ll get some stats for you.

This is how I do it. I put my Steam directory in an external BTRFS drive with compression turned on. Works great, and allows me to take my library between computers.

If you know what you’re doing, no. If you don’t know what you are doing, yes.

The difference is the knowledge you gain from traditional learning and experience.

I agree that books are much better resources to learn in a structured way. This builds a solid foundation where you can then use LLMs to fill the boring gaps.

You’re doing it right, using it as a tool to learn.

I’m doing the same to get a handle on Python. I question the steps, compare it with other sources, and try to get comfortable coding it myself. I then use it to review my code, and get further insights.

It’s a tool. Just another tool.

Please, do elaborate.

Also avoid handling black holes without appropriate protection.

I have not made any case for Manjaro. I simply said it works well enough for me.

I also said that I know the story and have used many different OSes and Linux distros, so I know full well their underlying philosophies.

You seem to want to get me to defend Manjaro to have someone to argue with. Sorry, I don’t have enough investment in Manjaro to argue with you. I’m just too lazy to distro hop.

the only people who like manjaro haven’t tried anything else and haven’t really thought about their distros philosophies at all, or just got really unlucky with other distros.

Look, I’ve used more different OSes than I can remember. I used everything from CP/M to Solaris. I’ve used Microsoft Xenix, HP-UX, OS/2, Haiku, BSDs, you name it. I’ve used Slackware, Knoppix, Tom’s RootBoot, Puppy Linux, Debian, RedHat Linux (not RHEL, the original), Corel Linux, Mandrake, Caldera.

I love weird OSes and their history. I think I have enough knowledge to jump ship when a distro is giving me a hard time. I use Debian on all servers, Xubuntu or Kubuntu (de-SNAPed, of course) on desktops. But my personal laptop is running Manjaro for years now because it works, stays fresh, and gets out of my way.

Maybe, I don’t know. I tend to stay on the .deb side of the fence.

Are you dual booting Ubuntu with Windows? Because Windows fast boot causes that behavior.

I got a little bored with the anxiety of point version upgrades that standard distributions follow every 6 months or so.

Rolling distros like Manjaro work much smoother for my use case (web browsing, some gaming, light coding).

Good.

As a long time Manjaro user is good to see something happening.

As to why I’m a Manjaro user: I installed it on my laptop years ago and it served me well, with only a couple of hiccups (the now famous SSL certificate issue and some repo keys that were broken), nothing too difficult to overcome but that points out some major organizational problems.

Other than that, it just works wonderfully and I’m too lazy to hop.

You have options, no need to advocate against them.

Think of it as the gaming subsystem for Linux.

Winamp.

Actually no, Audacious player can load old Winamp skins.