-> More customization of the installation.
Ubuntu kind of nails this one down in some areas, especially the disk management. I don’t like having separate /, /boot and /swap partitions; also don’t like not being able to choose where to install the bootloader, and I don’t get why the install partition must not be formatted for it to be valid.
I also enjoy the auto-login.
-> Audio volume
Ubuntu lets you choose whether you want to go higher than the regular 100%, and scales the volume bar accordingly. CLOS doesn’t make that distinction, and enables the over-amplification by default, which causes distortion. Just gives us an option to disable/enable it.
The volume thing is something Ubuntu does differently than upstream GNOME. We tend to take GNOME defaults instead. I admit it would be interesting to see how Ubuntu limits this but I think we will want to stay closer to GNOME than Ubuntu. Maybe @mesiment can comment on it.
First of all, thanks for your comments, those are really helpful to understand better what is working and what is not for our users.
→ More customization of the installation.
Ubuntu kind of nails this one down in some areas, especially the disk management. I don’t like having separate /, /boot and /swap partitions; also don’t like not being able to choose where to install the bootloader, and I don’t get why the install partition must not be formatted for it to be valid.
I also enjoy the auto-login.
For this part maybe @mhorn can comment better than me.
→ Audio volume
Ubuntu lets you choose whether you want to go higher than the regular 100%, and scales the volume bar accordingly. CLOS doesn’t make that distinction, and enables the over-amplification by default, which causes distortion. Just gives us an option to disable/enable it.
For this, we actually change the gnome default (which I believe ubuntu just follows upstream default of allow-volume-above-100-percent = false)
(I just verified on a 18.04.2 LTS release fwiw).
we set this to true which effectively allows GNOME desktop to go beyond the 100% volume. The default change can be seen in the clr-desktop-defaults repository.
This default change was applied back in January and while I find it useful (e.g: some apps are not really helpful regarding output volume) I agree we could change this back to the GNOME default of false if enough users are bothered with the current default Clear Linux is shipping with.
About the volume thing, my point is that there is an option in the audio settings that allows users to change that, that CLOS doesn’t have. The default isn’t the problem. Changing it not being straightforward that is.
It is currently Clear Linux requirement to have a /boot partition – the installer doesn’t have control over this. Also, this planned change will not remove the requirement for a swap partition, but you can tag and reuse an existing swap partition. Using a swap file instead of a swap partition is being tracked but not addressed in the upcoming release.
My experience is that my defaulted 244M swap partition is not enough for 16 gig of memory.
Perhaps there is a different issue. Most of the time when top shows the 244M all red and consumed, it stays that way. I would have to guess that something “else” needs memory and allocates the swapped memory. Often I blame firefox web pages that likely throw up ads continuously (even when not displayed) for consuming enough memory and getting swap allocated. Last night it was rsync (mostly by itself) that probably used as much memory as it could, and again, something else in the system caused the swap allocation. Swap consumption seems to be also related to familysearch.org pages - like memory gets allocated, but not released when the tabs close. Swap still does not free if all firefox windows close.
After rsync finished, the swap did not free. Other times, I have shut down everything and the swap stayed allocated. I think I even tried logging out to see if the Gnome applications would terminate and give back the swap, to no avail.
Is there a system command to identify processes associated with the swap space?
I have found that with swap consumed, the system gets messed up in what I guess as high memory usage situations, with the disk like blinking heavily, and even the cursor is unresponsive to execute a shutdown.
Here, the main reason for a larger swap partition would be for head room so when swap gets allocated and not released, there is time to respond before calamity strikes. As an aside, I have used Fedora for years and had the same issues relating to firefox and swap consumption. There I had 5 or 8 gigs of swap on an 8 gig memory system. Over time allocated swap would grow. Similar unresponsive system with heavy swap occurred, so I do not view this as a Clear Linux specific issue.
There are different philosophies when it comes to “swap size”. We are aware that some people think that they need gigabytes of swap, but, in many cases, this is not based on any factual data. As a matter of fact, using lots of swap is (especially on SSD’s) not wanted and may cause extra wear to the SSD, which for laptops would be highly problematic.
Even if you google you will find that nowadays most distributions don’t recommend “2x RAM” anymore at all, and most are relatively conservative (e.g. how large should swap be - Google Search).
Please note that many distributions assume you hibernate which would require large amounts of swap. Because ClearLinux doesn’t support hibernation, these recommendations are not relevant. There are very few links that should any relevant information specifically for cases where hibernation is NOT used, and therefore you should take that into account.
My personal advice would be: unless the current swap size is a problem, leave it as default. Just because your swap is all used shouldn’t be a reason to increase it, because, those same programs will just eat up everything you give to them. If you are doing stuff like lots of VMs then that would be a good reason to increase swap.
Another angle is that you can change swap and assign more, and this is simple. Therefore, the default is a reasonably good starting position for most users, and changing the default would affect many of the users negatively, as they would lose a significant amount of usable storage space immediately.
I really have not figured out what is going on in my world. It seems to be a usage pattern on my part. In my Fedora days, I had 5 gigs of swap and over time, watch it get used to 1 gig, then 2, then 3. If I reboot, and restart firefox with the same tabs open, all is fine, but over time swap would get consumed again. If I ignored it, the disk light would go solid and the machine would become unresponsive to anything but a power switch, the big hammer. That happened a number of times when I was not paying attention, or thought I could postpone it a bit more. That tends to be a bit hard on the file system …
Oddly, top shows no process resident or total size that would indicate swap should be happening. Even terminating all of my processes (nice exit, not kill -9 kind of terminate) does not return swap. Here with CL, I see the 244M of swap turn “red”, and only once get some of it back when all of my processes were gone. Even after logging out and back in, top showed swap consumed. Whatever I am doing, some process that is not related to my session must still be somewhat paged out. I can do additional experiments, but the just under 2 gigs of memory consumed after booting and logging in will usually not all come back if I log out and back. So the memory is going elsewhere.
Of course, I do not understand the Linux swapping algorithm any more with changes over the years. I suppose I should go read some O/S code. With 16 gigs of memory, it still seems odd that I should see swap being used with only 8 gigs of memory consumed. I guess there is a peak somewhere that I have not observed. Maybe some logging would tell me that. Like most of us, the occasional reboot will postpone my problem (no this is not Windows) to the point that I can get on with other things living on my plate. (One might think I have plenty of time, being retired, but do not believe those rumors.)
I’m glad you touched on the subject because there’s one more thing I can’t believe I forgot to mention in the original post, nor that apparently it hasn’t been brought up: we still can’t not have a swap partition.
I actually set my swap partition to 32MiB because apparently that’s the least amount the installer requires (last time I checked). I’d like to have no swap at all.
Also, the volume in the top bar is missing a really useful feature that the audio settings volume bar has: when you reach 100%, it sticks on it even if you move the mouse a tiny bit more. That’s useful because there’s no way to tell the volume level by just moving the slider, as there’s no number, and because it prevents you from going over 100% if doing that it’s not what you intend to do.
I regularly find myself opening the audio settings and adjusting the system volume from there just to make sure I’m at 100%, no more, no less.
So in gnome it has two levels of “lower power”, one is to turn the screen off, the other is a deeper level of sleep (uses) less power. So is that what is called “suspend” vs. hibernate?
