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.
I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it’s data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it’s hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It’ll download all packages again even though there’s minimal change.
Interesting! Any reason for this choice instead of doing everything through nix?
That’s quite convincing :) I’ve been meaning to try gentoo for many years actually. I’ll install it soon and report back!
Yep. I used the Xfce iso.
Thank you that makes sense. When I get my hands on a more powerful machine and have less data constraints, I’ll try Nixos again. I do miss it sometimes 😆
A laptop with 8 GB of ram and 6 cores. I have only one machine that I use for work. That’s the main issueI. Need to find a free weekend to compile and try out gentoo 😅
I’ll try it sometime.
Yeah I guess so then all those that remain are the benefits of Nixos 👍
That’s right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)
It’s definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)
I definitely want to try out gentoo sometime. My system is not very powerful. I’m afraid it’ll compile for many days 😅
I was just going off based on its history. It began based on gentoo. (Wikipedia) but yea it is independent now.
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.
Other than the obvious things like arch having better docs and lots of packages, void reminds me of arch before systemd. Especially editing rc.conf etc.
Was it recent? I remember doing the same some years 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.
Thank you!
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.
Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.
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