Gentoo is GOAT. I am also glad that Arch exists though. Both have excellent wikis, good knowledgeable communities, lots of configuration options. In terms of pure speed, it is hard to beat a build it all from source as per your own custom USE flags setup like in Gentoo.
THIS WAS THE MEME I WAS ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR!! Thanks!
Those modules, man… they’re the biggest cause of—dare I say it?—bloat in the kernel.
For the few people here who may not know about it: there’s a utility called modprobe-db that watches what kernel modules get loaded at runtime, and can generate a kernel build config file accordingly. There’s even an ArchWiki article about it. You need to keep it around for a while (e.g. several weeks or months) so it can get a proper sample of the modules you use; that way, your kernel can have all the modules you need (ask me how I know). If you do it right, however, you can slim down your compile time significantly.
Fun fact about monitors turning on slowly: did you know Windows has a bluescreen code for that?
The WIN32K_POWER_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check has a value of 0x0000019C. This indicates that Win32k did not turn the monitor on in a timely manner.
That’s right, Windows will panic and throw a bluescreen if your monitors take a little too long to wake up. Had the pleasure of dealing with this suddenly becoming an issue and causing wide bluescreens on wakeup after an update back in mid-2024, on any Surface Dock using DisplayPort with specific Acer monitors.
Woah woah… is there someplace in the event logs where this would show? Does this mean that you cannot run a windows computer headless?
It gets logged in the event viewer, yeah. That’s how I discovered it, on account of the screens not waking up in time to show the actual bluescreen. The users were only reporting that their computers were deleting all their windows when waking up. From their perspective, all they saw was their computer taking a mildly longer time to wake up from deep sleep and then losing their entire session, but what it was actually doing was hard rebooting.
Headless is fine, the bug was specifically triggered when a computer woke up and detected a monitor exists, but the monitor took some unspecified amount of time too long to wake up. It was also fixed at some point, I’m not sure when, but it went on long enough that we swapped dozens of cables because it specifically only happened on the ones using DisplayPort, not HDMI.
Wow… I feel like I might have ran into this issue dozens of times. So cool the kinds of things I learn here
Oh shit, this may be the problem I’ve been having with my laptop dock at work
I feel like the boot time is almost entirely uefi ram timing shenanigans these days
I hate my monitor for that. Entering the bios is guesswork about when to press a key if I remember what key to press. Also I can’t turn it on too early before the PC or it will go to stand by after not receiving a signal for two seconds and then take even longer.
I want a monitor turns on and stays on.
Let me guess, samsung odyssey? Had one of those, never again.
Friend even called me that he has fucked up his pc rebuild - his Samsung monitor was just not waking up because it literally turns off.
Typical Samsung product. Good hardware, acceptable build quality/ material selection, horrible software.
On mine you can’t even select the input manually, the monitor always cycles through every input. Couldn’t find anything on input 2 I just plugged in? Let’s do another round of checking all inputs for 10 seconds, and again, and again… And always finish on the input you started, or turn off if no active input is found.
Software always destroys their products.
All modern monitors are like this now. Dell, HP, Asus…
Doesn’t detect input? Instant power off. Now you have to press the menu key every 5 seconds to try and find the input for your PC.
Beyond ridiculous. I have a Dell that’s like 15 years old and it stays on for multiple minutes before going into power saving. It’s glorious
I’ve learned the hard way that there’s only one decent Samsung product line - from big appliances to little electronics - and it’s their phones (and even those leave questions on privacy).
in that case there are zero decent Samsung product lines.
horrible repairability, horrible privacy with all the built in bloatware and spyware, no more bootloader unlock to get rid of all of them, but even before they made that impossible they were the only android phone maker that required their own quirky tools for that, and blowing permanent efuses while at it.
That’s funny, while I still buy Samsung TVs, I hate their phones. So much of what their phones can do is usually locked to only working in Samsung’s apps and those are universally dog shit. The phones themselves are also often privacy and user control nightmares.
Granted, there isn’t a lot of good choices for phones these days. I’m still running an old LG phone and have been looking outside Android as my next possible solution. But, I also haven’t had a reason to upgrade.
Have a Samsung TV and it’s by far my least favorite. Turns off at random, takes forever to switch inputs, turns on at random…
As for phones I’m eyeing the Motorola RazrFold, since they’re supposedly offering it Graphene-ready
Turn off all of the Energy Saving/Eco Solution crap. It will stop turning off and you will get s brighter inage that doesn’t shift in brightness.
You should also switch to Movie mode in the picture settings and set dejudder/deblur (under Motion Clarity) to 0 while you’re at it so it doesn’t turn everything into 60 fps with fake frames.
I heard Samsung’s SD cards are good
Their SSDs are/were considered amongst the best options, but I haven’t looked into them since the 970 Evo days and they could be crap now for all I know.
Only SD card I’ve ever had die. I go with sandisk for important SD cards and team group for less important ones. Neither have ever failed.
It’s an MSI but now looking at pictures ofequivalent samsung odysseys it might very well be the same monitor with a different sticker on the back.
And yes, it turns off, the PC doesn’t see a monitor so it doesn’t send a signal, and the monitor doesn’t turn on either because it’s not receiving any signal.
REISUB time when that happens.
Had the same behaviour with an acer monitor, that shit definitely flows from the same factory
Afaik it’s a displayport issue (because DP has the feature to detect if PC is on). I’ve had the issue on multiple monitors that it wouldn’t turn on the next time I booted the PC. After a lot of unsuccessful googling I finally found that the pc off-> monitor off -> pc on-> pc doesn’t see monitor -> monitor stays off apparently happens because of a capacitor not discharging properly, getting the monitor stuck in “pc off” state. Flipping the monitor power switch (or disconnecting the power cable) for 15-20 seconds has so far always fixed it for me.
But maybe there are other reasons too.
I’m not saying that’s not the case, but it has both hdmi and displayport, and it’s happening with both, had it on either one, alternating, both plugged in, nothing plugged in and then jamming either cable in there as stuff was powering on, I did eventually resign myself to having to yank out the power cable and plug it back in when it was misbehaving. Nowadays it’s just sitting in a corner, seldom used, should honestly toss it but it’s still sorta works, when it feels like it.
I have a modern Lenovo monitor (2020) that takes longer to wake up than my hp monitor. So annoying.
Edit: aforementioned is from 2011 and is a zr2040w.
The Lenovo monitor is a d22e-20
i have a shitty little AOC 20 inch monitor that doesnt even have any physical controls on it,connected via a Displayport to VGA adapter, and a big 27 inch dell monitor connected via HDMI.
the shit little monitor always wakes up like 2 seconds after the PC does, the dell takes for fuckin ever. often just waking up in time to see the OS login screen.
Entering the bios is guesswork about when to press a key
What is there to guess? Just spam the fuck out of that key.
However, I also don’t know why you’re visiting the BIOS regularly.
What’s this “boot” of which you speak?
Do people really turn their machines off these days?
Yup. My entire PC desk (monitor, PC, 2+1 speakers) draw 7W when the PC is turned off (old speakers draw power when off for some reason). For comparison: My NUC server draws 7W white turned on, doing useful work. This infuriates me, so I got a zigbee power switch and shut the PC desk completely off when I’m not home.
If 7W for nothing pisses me off, you’re damn straight an idle or sleeping PC will too!Yes, I’m not wasting my hardware life and electricity for no gain.
Thermal cycling
You’ve got to reboot after kernel updates, otherwise it can’t load new modules. I’ve been confused at least twice why something didn’t load until.I remembered the reboot.
I think the command “systemctl kexec” would like to have a word. Great command to know if you have a VM on a system you dont manage / share with others.
Great command to know if you have a VM on a system you dont manage / share with others.
won’t this kill all their processes just the same?
So you can just run kexec if its installed on the distro. This tells the kernel to boot into another kernel. The reason to use it with systemctl is to properly shut down all the services running in userspace. That command will have systemd gracefully turn off all services and then the new kernel with whatever updates / modules can be loaded in a clean environment.
Its useful if say, you have a VM in a data center. Now most of them provide a web gui where you can turn your VM off and then on. But if you’re lazy like me and already remoted into the terminal lol
but I still don’t get it. couldn’t you just systemctl reboot? it will boot the new kernel that way too. its supposed to be the same as from the web gui
If you run systemctl reboot on a non-vm it will actually power cycle the system and cause it to go back through the BIOS and then the bootloader. Using systemctl kexec allows you to “restart” the computer without having to go all the way back through the full boot process.
In the case of a VM, some are setup to do this behind the scenes. For example, virt-manager allows for direct kernel booting. If you look in the options there will be a path to the kernel. If its not setup that way, then the VM still has a bootloader. In that case, restarting the VM with kexec will allow for a faster reboot since the bootloader is skipped completely.
I didn’t know about that one.
I hope it helps you someday! :)
Gtk what replaced ‘telinit 3’
yes
Every day
Folk w/o FDE …
What?
Full disk encryption
(I can’t beat monitor powering up.)
Slowing you down. Ah, same. I may have used higher than default iterations 😅
Get a ardunio and wire up a bop-it so you can unlock your computer faster.
Maybe if you used TPM key storage to automate the unlock. But ofc that reduces security
Maybe dropbear and unlock really fast from another device where the monitor is already on?
I’ll just get one of those closed sauce humanoid robots dependent on AI megacorps to input the pass at superspeed.
Or just tell it to keep the monitor turned off & only power it on once desktop shows up.
The future is near!!
And you can’t forget the BIOS password
I thought arch was all about reducing bloat. Is gentoo better than arch?
Gentoo recompiles everything, so it can do optimisations based on your particular setup Arch can’t.
You can also just recompile the kernel and any utils yourself on Arch, if you want
Yeah, but I’m using Arch cause I have better things to do. You guys have fun compiling your own stuff without me.
The only times I’ve compiled the arch kernel was for benchmarking
You can recompile the kernel in any distro. In Gentoo, you have to compile the kernel (because you compile everything).
In Gentoo, you have to compile the kernel
This is not true any more. Gentoo provides sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin as an option.
gentoo arch?
Obviously arch can be rebuilt pretty easily, gentoo does almost nothing that arch can’t, and rebuilding itself osn’t one of those things. Look up ABS.
Arch is about telling other people what you use. If you use gentoo, you can take way more pride in you installation.
Arch is pourover coffee; Gentoo is those ridiculous Rube Goldberg setups that take 45 minutes to make a single cup. Both are for hipsters.
Do love a good pourover, excellent analogy.
Ubuntu is that shitty Keurig machine with big plastic pods, but they call them “snaps”.
Does that make Debian standard filter coffee? The coffee everyone can get behind 🫶
I’d argue that there’s literally no difference in difficulty of installing Arch vs Gentoo vs LFS. The only difference lies in the convenience of package management. Arch is very convenient, everything is precompiled. Gentoo is more time consuming. No difference in setting stuff up tho. LFS makes you be the package manager. Which isn’t really difficult, all programs clearly state which dependencies they have, but it’s just much more time consuming.
After restarting the installation for the 5th time, and wasting 5 hours compiling the kernel each time, you should be proud you finally can type on the TTY.
My 13 years old AMD FX-6300 can compile kernel in about half an hour. Sounds like a skill issue.
How long does it take to open the Wikipedia page on hyperbole?
Arch basically happens at a granularity of individual packages. You decide from the ground up which packages you actually need, which is how you end up with a comparatively minimal setup.
But yeah, if the package itself is big, then Arch doesn’t usually deal with that. The Linux kernel comes with drivers for most hardware out of the box, which you can remove, if you know you won’t need that hardware.
And while this can also be done on Arch, it is Gentoo’s thing to do precisely that.To add to this, the big thing you get when using Gentoo is to setup your compiler to use all of the optimizations for your exact CPU/other hardware.
The binaries for arch are built for generic x86-64, while your Gentoo system could bet setup to include AMD-specific optimizations or to remove code paths that you would never used based on your hardware.
The result will be that the binaries will typically be smaller and optimized specifically for your hardware.
The downside is that a system update will take you half a day of churning your CPU on compiling.
Keep going. Kevin can get smaller, leaner, faster and hopefully has apparmor or selinux already.
this reminds me i should update my kernel
Statements of the utterly deranged
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My laptop boots much faster than my desktop PC (both running Fedora 43) despite my desktop PC being much faster.
Does your desktop have more RAM, or faster RAM? If so, the training step can take much longer. In your desktop’s BIOS look for a setting called “Memory Context Restore” and turn it on. That can dramatically speed up boot times.
That setting is no joke, I was pissed I didn’t enable it sooner
My machine went from 45+ seconds to 13 for boot
Yes to both. I’ll take a look for that setting, thanks!
