
Debian 10 Buster: First impressions on a 2017 laptop with an M.2 NVMe SSD - passthejoe
http://passthejoe.net/post/2019_0902_debian_10_first_impressions/
======
wyldfire
> 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.

~~~
realusername
> 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.

~~~
IloveHN84
I feel the same with the switch from HDD to SSD on Mac.. without a SSD, MacOS
is really slow

~~~
smnrchrds
And yet Apple still sells their base model 2019 iMacs with HDDs.

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sitzkrieg
> And hearing about arduous, days-long efforts to install Windows 10 on an M.2
> SSD didn’t excite me about trying it.

what? it works fine

~~~
degski
Not using UEFI does not work that well, then you're back to MBR and the
continual fight between Windows and GRUB.

I run a dual boot Win10/Fedora30 system (UEFI on a SATA3 SSD), it's pretty
good, both Windows and Fedora.

~~~
Dylan16807
Why would you not use UEFI?

~~~
majewsky
People seem to be afraid they get one of those broken UEFI implementations
from 8-10 years ago. So they choose the BIOS Legacy mode which nowadays is
more likely to be broken because of lack of testing.

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derjames
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.

~~~
rstuart4133
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.

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maximente
> 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

etc. it's anti-modular and so i can't support it.

~~~
octotoad
Security fixes are backported to Debian stable release packages. Any
respectable, production-ready, stable/LTS distro does this.

Obviously you don't get the new features and functionality that may be
introduced in an upstream major release, but security patches are covered.

~~~
p1necone
The extra work (presumably it's non trivial) to do this could be spent on
further hardening the current version if they didn't need to be supported
though.

~~~
0815test
Debian's current, supported version _is_ the stable version. The reason why
it's only released every two years and why it feels so 'old', is because it
takes Debian Developers many months to "further harden" it before release. It
wouldn't make sense to release it under a quicker schedule. Debian does offer
"rolling" channels with prompt updates (testing, unstable) but those are
officially _not_ meant for real, production use.

~~~
p1necone
I'm not talking about Debian, I'm talking about the old versions of third
party software shipped with Debian that have to continue being supported with
security updates.

------
bbulkow
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.

~~~
flukus
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-...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-
Laptop-2/8XQJKK3DD91B?crosssellid=surfacefamily4a&selectedColor=000000&preview=&previewModes=))
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.

~~~
Dylan16807
The surface laptop is uniquely awful among windows laptops for how hard it is
to replace anything. For a normal laptop, the cost of self-upgrading to a 1TB
SSD is $100-$170, and it takes less than five minutes to install.

~~~
flukus
I see the same almost everywhere, on HP's site
([https://store.hp.com/us/en/vwa/laptops/form=Standard-
laptop](https://store.hp.com/us/en/vwa/laptops/form=Standard-laptop)) they
have some cheap laptops with 1TB HDD's but even now the cheapest with 512GB
SSD's start at 3 times the price.

Upgrading myself is probably the best option, but there's a minefields of
things I'm not confident with when it comes to mobile hardware.

IME running linux, especially a lightweight distro, makes more of a
performance difference than an SSD anyway, at least with my usage.

Edit -also at $170 it would just about be doubling the price of an otherwise
acceptable laptop, so hardly a huge win.

~~~
Dylan16807
The price gouging for larger drives is common all over. The inability to do it
yourself is rare.

There's very little that can go wrong when cloning a 2TB or less drive and it
requires $10 of extra hardware.

If you're happy with installing your OS from scratch, like you would when
switching to linux, then there is basically zero reason to hesitate on putting
in a new drive. Drive bays are designed for easy access.

------
unlimit
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.

edit: I too run debian buster.

~~~
cuu508
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.

~~~
unlimit
Thanks for the tip, I will definitely look at it.

I think I might as well get a decent Ryzen 3/5 desktop just for Android
Studio.

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shmerl
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.

~~~
Zardoz84
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 ?

~~~
shmerl
It was more than 90 seconds for me. I'm not going back to HDD for $HOME for
sure ;) Nothing special was configured. I also suspect, that splash screen was
bugged. I always disable it now.

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Zardoz84
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.

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dmix
Using Gnome 3 was a performance problem? I've never really saw it that way.
Even when I switched to tiling it was never a big motivation.

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vfclists
I think you mean a 1 TB magnetic drive.

I don't think the Debian 10 DVD itself fits on a 1GB DVD

~~~
teilo
Yeah, we all knew what he meant, and felt no need to correct the obvious.

Also, the Debian 10 netinstall ISO is 334MB, and is all I have ever used.

~~~
naikrovek
He cites the 1GB size TWICE, though...

