> I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.
It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance.
> It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance.
On Windows 10 it's definitely worse for sure. I don't know what they did since Win7 but it's pretty much unusable without an SSD now whereas a Debian would still run quite okay although slower.
I wouldn't be so sure. Linux still makes very good use of spinning rust media, and on a modern system with 2GB+ RAM (and a reasonably light distro like Debian) much of it ends up being used as disk cache so drive speeds aren't even that relevant. SSD's do speed up the boot process though, I'll give you that.
A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). Newer hard drives tend to be pretty snappy under Debian, unless your disk is degraded (eg: dying blocks causing I/O to chug, watch for SMART errors).
Long time Debian user here, since Debian 6. My main laptop is a Dell Inspiron 3000 AMD E2 6110 Quad core with integrated Radeon R2 8 GB RAM and Standard 500 Gb 5400RPM hard drive. The OS is Debian 10 with Gnome3(Previously the laptop had Debian 8). I just want to say that Debian 10 is fast in this hardware and I mean fast. The system is so responsive. Everything works and was properly detected. Everything is very polished. Extraordinary work from the Debian team.
It is fast - that was the first thing I noticed as well.
About 1/2 an hour later the screen went black and the machine stopped responding to key presses. Eventually I resurrected by flipping to a text console and back, (Ctrl-Alt-F1, Crtl-Alt-F7).
It turned out it was putting itself to sleep. After a few minutes. While on AC. And my fart arsing about wasn't fixing the problem - it was just soaking up time while X took its own sweet time to wake up (the text consoles were available immediately).
And then this happened on other laptops I installed it on. Fixing it by disabling suspend when on AC is a nightmare. Every program + it's dog seems to have had a go at setting it - xscrensaver, window managers, display managers, X itself and systemd. Which one wins (ie the one you have to use to fix it, because it set it last) is a lottery.
Maybe they can put fixing that mess on the list for bullseye.
> I really don’t need the newest of everything, especially if my hardware is working well
this sounds dubious if one has, say, a web browser installed or other consumer-type software. you almost surely want the latest security updates (which are for better or worse often packaged alongside cosmetic or other performance updates) for a piece of software like this.
for this reason i've moved to a releaseless distro. the idea that i can't get the latest firefox without upgrading my "operating system" version to a new release seems harmful for most types of software:
- imagine updating an app required you to upgrade your iOS/android version
- imagine updating a plugin requires updating your browser
For Chromium, Debian Stable always keeps it up to update with the latest upstream version.
for this reason i've moved to a releaseless distro. the idea that i can't get the latest firefox without upgrading my "operating system" version to a new release seems harmful for most types of software:
Hehehe, that's exactly what "releaseless" distros like Arch do, you have to update everything to have the latest of anything (unless you want breakage).
Very surprised this made the front page. Everyone should have shifted to ssds years ago for laptops. The productivity win was a no brainer a very long time ago.
Last time I got a new laptop (which probably was a few years ago now) the price just wasn't reasonable for a large enough SSD, 512GB is my minimum for it's occasional multimedia uses and database work.
Even now prices have apparently come down but larger drives often only come with high end SKU's. Looking at the MS Surface page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-...) 512GB is only available if I also get 16GB of RAM and a core i7 model, which is well beyond my needs and desire to pay for. 1TB is only comes with the silver model.
So even my next laptop might feature spinning rust, if any exist. On the plus side HDD's add a level of chunkiness I like in laptops.
Going to an SSD is like going EV vs petrol car. You'll be blown away by how obviously inefficient decades-old technology feels. Even a cheaper SSD is much faster than a top-of-the-line HDD - and the analogy to EVs hold here as well.
For power users (as one of the other child posts states) the extra space afforded by HDDs did have a use case a couple years ago.
As an application drive, or a drive in a device where the only other moving parts are input keys and fans, SSDs are completely the way to go. Even if dropped weirdly at least the data is probably recoverable.
Unless it's cheep bulk or high-write turn over spinning rust makes less and less sense. Though the cost for bulk storage still favors it. (Given the write endurance, I'd also prefer SSDs to be at least half as expensive.)
I run a AMD A8-7410 with 8GB RAM laptop from 2015. I too recently upgraded to a SSD. Unlike OP, mine is a internal SSD. The improvements have been ridiculous. The only regret is why I did not upgrade earlier.
By the way, I don't think anything can help android studio. It has improved but gradle is still slow.
Android Studio is heavy, but throwing hardware at it does help.
With 8GB RAM I'd check if you're not reaching into swap already. Android Studio alone uses a good chunk of that. Then add an emulator, and a memory hungry browser, and you're swapping.
NVMe makes a huge difference to KDE login time. It's basically instant. On HDD it's excruciatingly slow, due to a ton of parallel I/O that happens during login process.
I login every day on KDE with a magnetic hard disk (Ubuntu 19.04), and the login time is really short (few seconds).
Perhaps is your setup. Do you config to init a awful quantity of scripts/task at login ?
Faster that Windows!
Don't looks impressive if Debian is running on a SDD and Windows on a magnetic hard disk. However, even on a magnetic hard disk, any modern Linux is more faster that Windows. Specially if is windows 10.
I don't know what M$ did, but every time that I used Windows 10, I see it hitting very hard the hard disk without doing nothing.
[+] [-] wyldfire|6 years ago|reply
It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance.
[+] [-] realusername|6 years ago|reply
On Windows 10 it's definitely worse for sure. I don't know what they did since Win7 but it's pretty much unusable without an SSD now whereas a Debian would still run quite okay although slower.
[+] [-] 0815test|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehhh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitzkrieg|6 years ago|reply
what? it works fine
[+] [-] degski|6 years ago|reply
I run a dual boot Win10/Fedora30 system (UEFI on a SATA3 SSD), it's pretty good, both Windows and Fedora.
[+] [-] oblio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juangacovas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derjames|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rstuart4133|6 years ago|reply
About 1/2 an hour later the screen went black and the machine stopped responding to key presses. Eventually I resurrected by flipping to a text console and back, (Ctrl-Alt-F1, Crtl-Alt-F7).
It turned out it was putting itself to sleep. After a few minutes. While on AC. And my fart arsing about wasn't fixing the problem - it was just soaking up time while X took its own sweet time to wake up (the text consoles were available immediately).
And then this happened on other laptops I installed it on. Fixing it by disabling suspend when on AC is a nightmare. Every program + it's dog seems to have had a go at setting it - xscrensaver, window managers, display managers, X itself and systemd. Which one wins (ie the one you have to use to fix it, because it set it last) is a lottery.
Maybe they can put fixing that mess on the list for bullseye.
[+] [-] timc3|6 years ago|reply
Personally if i had that configuration I would stop what i was doing and go get one, unless of course it means not feeding your family.
[+] [-] maximente|6 years ago|reply
this sounds dubious if one has, say, a web browser installed or other consumer-type software. you almost surely want the latest security updates (which are for better or worse often packaged alongside cosmetic or other performance updates) for a piece of software like this.
for this reason i've moved to a releaseless distro. the idea that i can't get the latest firefox without upgrading my "operating system" version to a new release seems harmful for most types of software:
- imagine updating an app required you to upgrade your iOS/android version
- imagine updating a plugin requires updating your browser
etc. it's anti-modular and so i can't support it.
[+] [-] octotoad|6 years ago|reply
Obviously you don't get the new features and functionality that may be introduced in an upstream major release, but security patches are covered.
[+] [-] Scarbutt|6 years ago|reply
for this reason i've moved to a releaseless distro. the idea that i can't get the latest firefox without upgrading my "operating system" version to a new release seems harmful for most types of software:
Hehehe, that's exactly what "releaseless" distros like Arch do, you have to update everything to have the latest of anything (unless you want breakage).
[+] [-] bbulkow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|6 years ago|reply
Even now prices have apparently come down but larger drives often only come with high end SKU's. Looking at the MS Surface page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-...) 512GB is only available if I also get 16GB of RAM and a core i7 model, which is well beyond my needs and desire to pay for. 1TB is only comes with the silver model.
So even my next laptop might feature spinning rust, if any exist. On the plus side HDD's add a level of chunkiness I like in laptops.
[+] [-] r00fus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjevans|6 years ago|reply
As an application drive, or a drive in a device where the only other moving parts are input keys and fans, SSDs are completely the way to go. Even if dropped weirdly at least the data is probably recoverable.
Unless it's cheep bulk or high-write turn over spinning rust makes less and less sense. Though the cost for bulk storage still favors it. (Given the write endurance, I'd also prefer SSDs to be at least half as expensive.)
[+] [-] unlimit|6 years ago|reply
By the way, I don't think anything can help android studio. It has improved but gradle is still slow.
edit: I too run debian buster.
[+] [-] cuu508|6 years ago|reply
With 8GB RAM I'd check if you're not reaching into swap already. Android Studio alone uses a good chunk of that. Then add an emulator, and a memory hungry browser, and you're swapping.
[+] [-] shmerl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|6 years ago|reply
I don't know what M$ did, but every time that I used Windows 10, I see it hitting very hard the hard disk without doing nothing.
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vfclists|6 years ago|reply
I don't think the Debian 10 DVD itself fits on a 1GB DVD
[+] [-] teilo|6 years ago|reply
Also, the Debian 10 netinstall ISO is 334MB, and is all I have ever used.