#2701 2025-06-27 10:04:47

mariannemarlow

Member

From: London

Registered: 2017-08-06

Posts: 213

Website

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Are you saying that the USB stick is the issue?

I suppose it's a possibility.

You only have the one USB drive?

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"There is nothing to compare with a budgie’s look of triumph when they have thrown an object on to the floor for their slave to pick up."
(Rose Youd 09/06/2012)

Sun For Miles

Member

Registered: 2017-04-12

Posts: 262

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Just found out about Fork Server support in Firefox for Linux (dom.ipc.forkserver.enable config option). Enabled it and will see if there is any notable improvement in performance.

Docs: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org … ork-server

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Señor Chang, why do you teach Spanish?

unklar

Back to the roots 1.9

From: #! BL

Registered: 2015-10-31

Posts: 2,640

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

   

        My laptop wont even let me run a distro from a live USB any more either.

    You're going to have to explain that one. You can't get a USB device to show up in the BIOS settings?

It shows up, but the Laptop wont run it. It says checking.. then fails.

@marianne,
can you please show us the output of the following terminal command WITH the stick inserted?

sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o list

ratcheer

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2015-10-05

Posts: 487

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Thanks, Sun For Miles. I'm trying the forkserver, too.

Sector11

Mod Squid Tpyo Knig

From: Upstairs

Registered: 2015-08-20

Posts: 8,008

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

@Sun For Miles &

Thanks, Sun For Miles. I'm trying the forkserver, too.

just now set: about:config

dom.ipc.forkserver.enable    true

Have either of you seen an improvement?

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Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

Sun For Miles

Member

Registered: 2017-04-12

Posts: 262

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

My assumption is that the biggest gain would be on machines with lower CPU and memory spec and I have fairly old CPU with 32GB of RAM so my expected gain would be mixed even in theory (because I don't care about RAM). My goal was to improve performance (speed of operations) of Firefox as much as possible, and that's how I have found this option. I haven't been tweaking Firefox on Linux desktop for about 5 years and this option was developed for Linux platform in recent years.

Personlly I have a feeling working with tabs might be snappier, but it might be placebo because I have applied many performance tweaks already. I would have to measure it in a programmatic way to confirm. I don't know about memory utilization, would have to measure that as well.

I will leave this option on. When I have some spare time I will find some benchmark and compare the results with the option on and off.

Last edited by Sun For Miles (2025-06-30 06:09:23)

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Señor Chang, why do you teach Spanish?

unklar

Back to the roots 1.9

From: #! BL

Registered: 2015-10-31

Posts: 2,640

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

I can confirm that this setting of the FF-esr results in a much smoother behavior on this 'weak' machine.
So far I have only worked with 3 TAB's at most and it was tough.

inxi -Mmxxx
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 20564QG v: ThinkPad T500
    serial: <superuser required> Chassis: type: 10 serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: LENOVO model: 20564QG serial: <superuser required>
    uuid: <superuser required> BIOS: LENOVO v: 6FET83WW (3.13 ) date: 03/15/2010
Memory:
  System RAM: total: 4 GiB available: 3.74 GiB used: 983.5 MiB (25.7%)
  Message: For most reliable report, use superuser + dmidecode.
  Array-1: capacity: 8 GiB slots: 2 modules: 2 EC: None
    max-module-size: 4 GiB note: est.
  Device-1: DIMM 1 type: DDR3 detail: synchronous size: 2 GiB
    speed: 1066 MT/s volts: N/A width (bits): data: 64 total: 64
    manufacturer: Elpida part-no: EBJ21UE8BAU0-AE-E serial: 30992ADF
  Device-2: DIMM 2 type: DDR3 detail: synchronous size: 2 GiB
    speed: 1066 MT/s volts: N/A width (bits): data: 64 total: 64
    manufacturer: Elpida part-no: EBJ21UE8BDS0-AE-F serial: F1131B65

Many thanks to @Sun For Miles for the tip! 

ratcheer

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2015-10-05

Posts: 487

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

@Sun For Miles &

Thanks, Sun For Miles. I'm trying the forkserver, too.

just now set: about:config

dom.ipc.forkserver.enable    true

Have either of you seen an improvement?

It seems a little snappier, but that could just be because I want to see that.

PS - I also have a fairly high performance PC, with Ryzen 9 CPU and 32 GB RAM.

Last edited by ratcheer (2025-07-01 12:58:32)

Sector11

Mod Squid Tpyo Knig

From: Upstairs

Registered: 2015-08-20

Posts: 8,008

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G 4 CPU
16GB Ram
FF-esr 128.11.0esr (64-bit)

And it "seems" to be a bit faster but as ratcheer said and Sun For Miles hinted at, "that could just be because I want to see that" 

I can confirm that this setting of the FF-esr results in a much smoother behavior on this 'weak' machine.
So far I have only worked with 3 TAB's at most and it was tough.
{snip}

Now that is good news.

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Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2025-01-18

Posts: 227

Website

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Just trying OpenMandriva Cooker with the xlibre 25 server.  Very stable for a development version.  Glad to see that X11 will live on.  Too bad the fork is too late for Debian 13.

Nice! I'm happy about that, nothing against wayland per se`, I just prefer X11.

Colonel Panic

Member

Registered: 2018-11-13

Posts: 1,403

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

In MX (XFce) at the moment, which I recently installed from a magazine cover disk.

Looking at ways to save system resources so I've installed Sarwer Ahmed Khan's MX Low Performance Pack;

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=85164

Early days yet but it all seems to be working well.

[Update on 07/07/2025: it looks like the thread on the MX forum has been deleted.]

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2025-07-07 22:00:34)

ratcheer

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2015-10-05

Posts: 487

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

I still run X on Arch Linux, and I will until they stop supporting it. When that happens, I don't know which way I'll turn.

mariannemarlow

Member

From: London

Registered: 2017-08-06

Posts: 213

Website

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Apologies, I did not see this reply until now

device             fs_type   label      mount point            UUID
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1          ext4      rootMX21   /                      37d71c77-2057-47f9-b8ed-b13a3b329414
/dev/sda2          swap      swapMX     [SWAP]                 675dac5b-e815-4a5d-ab70-b02e20e2b513
/dev/sdb           iso9660   CRMPXVOL_EN /media/marianne/CRMPXVOL_EN 2007-02-18-12-00-00-00

   

    You're going to have to explain that one. You can't get a USB device to show up in the BIOS settings?

It shows up, but the Laptop wont run it. It says checking.. then fails.

@marianne,
can you please show us the output of the following terminal command WITH the stick inserted?

sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o list

---

"There is nothing to compare with a budgie’s look of triumph when they have thrown an object on to the floor for their slave to pick up."
(Rose Youd 09/06/2012)

unklar

Back to the roots 1.9

From: #! BL

Registered: 2015-10-31

Posts: 2,640

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

^I assume this is just for demonstration purposes, or, do you really want to boot that antiquated Windows XP Professional from the stick?

First of all, you can't do that with M$. 

Which ISO do you want or have you downloaded?

Last edited by unklar (2025-07-11 14:18:05)

Colonel Panic

Member

Registered: 2018-11-13

Posts: 1,403

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Currently testing Soplos, which is a Spanish distro based on Debian Testing and using the XFce desktop manager.

First impressions are very favourable - Soplos looks very sleek with a default theme in snades of brown (sort of  coffee-come-creme brulee colours) and has a couple of well-thought out utilities which are unique to it, such as a graphical GRUB manager.

Only problem I've seen so far is that as you might expect the forums are all in Spanish.

[EDIT: unfortunately, Firefox in this distro is absolute rubbish - it displays tabs but not the associated windows, won't save my hotlists etc.

In the end my internet connection went down and I booted Spiral Oldstable instead, which I've always found to be reliable.]

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2025-07-20 12:01:21)

hhh

Gaucho

From: High in the Custerdome

Registered: 2015-09-17

Posts: 16,032

Website

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Tried Xfce recently, really nice but it sucks. It does everything needed but it needs some serious customization before you can use it.

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No, he can't sleep on the floor. What do you think I'm yelling for?!!!

darknetmatrix

Member

From: /home/labs

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 166

Website

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

after a long time using kde plasma i went back to LMDE, feels like homecoming

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close2zero

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2025-07-14

Posts: 33

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

Distro-hopping? Sounds scary to me. I did use CrunchBang Linux until the end of it. Debian and Ubuntu before that. Now I have grown so familiar with Arch Linux that changing to another distro makes no sense to me. But one thing I have kept from the time with CrunchBang Linux is a  pure minimalistic Desktop environment. Running X11 (xorg-server and xorg-xinit), openbox, tint2 and of course conky. So even if I don't have distro-hopped, I have kept my work environment as I did in CrunchBang Linux.

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while true; do mount /dev/close2zero /mnt/clarity; done

ratcheer

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2015-10-05

Posts: 487

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

@close2zero That's right. That's right.

MarkW

Member

Registered: 2024-11-03

Posts: 240

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

...That's right. that's right
I really love your tiger light