themagicalmammal/howtolinux

A Webpage with tips, tricks and guides for Linux. (with Algolia Search)

I am Dipan, a Full Stack Developer at Applied AGI in London, England.

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howtolinux's Issues

Some minor enhancement ideas

Hi,

I 've skimmed over your Guide again. So far great job adding new things and fixing other errors. While browsing through I still found some small things that irked me. I will just write these together since I am too lazy to open multiple issues, now a few suggestions:

In https://github.com/themagicalmammal/howtodebuntu#4-signal you recommend the signal Xenial PPA. This was irritating for me, since A) Xenial is out of support in 4 days and B) installing applications not build for your distribution can cause some major dependency conflicts. However after looking it up, this seems to be signals fault, not providing more builds. So I would suggest to link the flatpak there, as you did with other apps.

In https://github.com/themagicalmammal/howtodebuntu#3-bash-alias you miss some stuff. One minor quirk is the in unneeded sudo in both apt list and apt policy remove that please. Also for apt list I wondered why you use grep since apt list can list without it. It even supports GLOB-Patterns (appname). Also you say it's for searching apps, why not apt search?
Also in alias d="__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia"you forgot VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json. That line also exports your vulkan icd loader. This is needed for some games, because if they can't detect it, they use the first one in the alphabetical order. Usually AMD, so you can't play some games with vulkan, if you don't export the icd-loader too.

And another note, maybe use a separate file for for aliases like $HOME/.bash_alias since you can do a lot of other stuff with the bashrc so not mixing them up together is imho a good idea. To do this you need to create the .bash_alias file and the add this to the .bashrc: if [ -f ~/.bash_alias ]; then . ~/.bash_alias fi
. But even if you don't do that you a missing source ~/.bashrc as an update command for the bashrc there.
So I guess this is about it ;) Have a nice day.

Zswap

Hello there,

I recently learned about Zswap and thought it might be a nice addition for this guide, as it is (or rather might be) a performance improvement for PCs with low RAM. According to some sources I could find ZSWAP should be used instead of ZRAM, when there is a swap-file/partition on the disk. And ZRAM when you have no swap at all. I couldn't seem to find any clear answer which one is faster and I doubt there is any, I guess it depends on the machine and workload/used applications.

Some more things on enabling them and really basic usage:
ZRAM
Once you have installed zram-config, you can start it manually with sudo systemctl start zram-config. And the correct command to test if it's working should be zramctl instead of cat /proc/swaps. If you use a swap im addition to ZRAM you should adjust swapiness to 80-100 and page-cache to 0. Source for that: https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config
Documentation: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html?highlight=zram

ZSWAP
It can be enabled with echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled and then reboot.
Documentation:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/zswap.html?highlight=zswap

For both different compression algorithms can be used, I guess I would stick with the default ones, but a good comparison can be found here.

Remove "The Great Suspender" out of the extensions list as its Malware

In this Category (https://github.com/themagicalmammal/howtopopbuntu#extensions-i-use) the Chrome extension "The Great Suspender" is now Malware (https://www.techworm.net/2021/02/google-remove-great-suspender-extension.html).