[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 99 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Because modern web is bloatware. Too much javascript, CSS, ads and cookie popups. A phone's hardware and internet speeds are generally not as fast as a desktop. So, it takes much longer to render on a phone.

Also, a lot websites nowadays deliberately make their mobile web experience shitty (cough ** reddit cough) to force their users to install their app.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

Zram is basically a compressed swap device located in your ram. You can check the usage by running zramctl.

I would recommend setting mem_limit to 10 GB or disk_size to 40GB and algorithm to lz4.

https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config#example-configuration

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Zram usually has a very high compression ratio - around 4:1 for lz4 and 6:1 for zstd. You can set zram to 40-50 GB. It will still use less than 1/2 of your ram.

Zram has an option to write poorly compressible data to the disk instead of storing it in the ram. I would split the swap partition - 3 GB for zram writeback and rest for ordinary swap.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It's just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Was it recent? I remember doing the same some years ago ๐Ÿ˜†

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it's new and an independent distro. I'll try the other two some day.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago
[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.

Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah there's a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.

In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a "fresh install" on every reboot.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

๐ŸŽ‰ Same! I've been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 15 points 11 months ago

You mean in terms of how fast it feels? I have never heard anyone saying this before. Can you share some details and perhaps some tips to improve performance on Nixos?

What hardware do you run Nixos on and do you modify and rebuild a lot of packages on nixpkgs?

[-] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.

Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.

I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.

146
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by 7ai@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I'm happy with it so far.

Why did I switch?

  1. Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it'll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.

  2. Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it's around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.

Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?

  1. Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.

  2. Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It's harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn't a big issue for me most of the time.)

For now, I'll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.

My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it's probably not suitable for most.

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7ai

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