I just want to know the system I’m dealing with. It would be good if you could point out the changes made as compared to vanilla arch install.
I’m not talking about the different packages installed or packages from eos repo.
Im talking about the configuration changes made mainly in /etc
I know for a fact that dracut uses different compression than default in eos but would like to know about the changes made from vanilla arch (configuration wise)
Thanks.
You would need to go through the installer code to find everything we preconfigure.
We dont maintain a list.
The configuration we do for dracut is in /etc/dracut.conf.d/*
If you use systemd-boot you would need to look at the package kernel-install-dracut to see how we automate systemd-boot.
Can you link down the installer code?
Ya I know that.
Btw, how close is it to vanilla arch configuration wise?
It is pretty hard to answer how close it is to Vanilla arch since you can’t install Arch without doing some configuration.
I would say it’s pretty close if you discount the theming.
On Arch, you basically have to do everything yourself. You have to write your own fstab file (although you can use the genfstab utility), install and set up the display and sound servers yourself, generate initramfs and create boot loader entries yourself (and write your own pacman hooks to automate this process every time the kernel is updated), etc. etc. etc.
On Endeavour, all that stuff is set up for you during the installation process. Pipewire, firewall, avahi, polkit, etc. are set up for you. On Arch you have to install and configure them yourself.
We actually dont configure any of those things. We just install them.
I mean are there any opinionated configs just as what I found out its using zstd compression instead of the gzip compression for dracut.
I’m talking about configurations like these which are not to say a fix or anything, just a choice.
I would say vanilla arch is pretty much usable on most hardware, usually u need to config graphics drivers or so or xorg configuration, otherwise plain configs usually work as far as I have tested.
There are not many of those types of changes.
EOS tries not to be overly opinionated. We work to provide a usable base system that the individual can configure to their needs.
Arch uses mkinitcpio by default. Can we compare dracut configurations on both systems since Arch doesn’t have a standard for how dracut is supposed to be configured?
Well, the reason this question is very difficult to answer is that pretty much nothing in Arch is configured. So it’s hard to say how “different” EOS is compared to vanilla Arch. I mean, EOS is just a fast-forwarded version of Arch, if that makes sense.
Yep. That is my experience as well. Only small details have to be tweaked to improve user experience. When I first installed Arch on my laptop, I had to add xorg configs to enable “Tapping” mode for my touchpad, which I didn’t have to do for EOS. I also had to manually add “TearFree” and “SWcursor” for my amdgpu driver.
I think this question is impossible to answer, as every ‘vanilla’ Arch install is configured differently. For instance, when I do one I do it the ‘old’ way, but using rEFInd rather than grub or systemd-boot. I suspect that leaves a few changes around! My EnOS builds differ too (even from each other).
The more vanilla you want it, then the fewer ‘ticks’ you make in the online installer - entirely your choices from there!
Well, I didn’t mention it above, sorry for that. I am more interested in tweaks that can impact performance of a system, that’s why I pointed out the dracut compression as it’s the initrd image that’s compressed so its related to performance.
That would be a better question to ask.
I dont mind other configurations.
If anybody knows about any tweaks that could impact performance done by EOS by default should comment on this thread.
Thanks.
Hope you don’t mind me changing the title of the topic to reflect better what you have in mind.
I don’t think there are that many tweaks in a fresh EOS installed other than the theming and the inclusion of useful scripts for automating certain tasks (pacman hooks, etc./ stuff that needs to be there anyway even when you’re running vanilla arch).
Apart from the theming and the inclusion of pre-installed packages, there really isn’t any practical difference in terms of performance between Arch and EOS simply because both distros run on the same kernel(s) and the same init system (systemd).
AFAIK, tweaks to improve user experience have to be done manually on EOS just like in vanilla Arch.
Also, maybe you can start by specifying the flavor of EOS you have in mind. Maybe the KDE version of EOS has more tweaks than the XFCE version?
Perhaps the choice between dracut and mkinitcpio have some performance impact? I highly doubt it, but maybe you can look into that. Even if it does have an impact, you have the choice to pick one tool over the other during Arch’s installation anyway, so it no longer has anything to do with distro choice.
What you are talking about is eye candy and stuff. I’m more looking for tweaks that have performance impact.
Not really looking for changes in appearance etc.
Thanks for the input though.
The core tweaks that could impact performance would be the same regardless of the desktop environment or window manager etc in the eos install.
The reason I talked about dracut was because even in arch linux if you do a dracut install, the default compression is gzip as stated in the wiki. You have to change it yourself to another compression.
These are the kind of tweaks I want to know more about.
Although compression methods performance impact might be negligible but I just want to know how close is it regards to performance tweaks like that as compared to vanilla arch linux.
I see. My apologies for misunderstanding.
This would be things like using tmpfs to improve performance in applications, right? If I’m not mistake EOS does this by default? On Arch you have to include it into /etc/fstab yourself. Maybe looking at the /etc/fstab of a fresh EOS installation might give a clue in this regard. Like some of the mount options, perhaps.
Yeah that’s what I was talking about. I didn’t consider this before. Thanks bro.
Mounting /tmp as tmpfs is definitely a performance tweak.
Other than the various tweaks we make to dracut, I can’t think of anything we do to tune performance.
In fact, I am not sure that the changes we make to dracut have any meaningful impact to performance either other than perhaps reducing system boot time slightly.
On Arch, /tmp is mounted on a tmpfs even if you don’t explicitly do it in /etc/fstab so that should not have any impact either way.
This is from an Arch install:
>> grep tmp /etc/fstab
>> findmnt -n /tmp [1]
/tmp tmpfs tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,size=32843992k,nr_inodes=1048576,inode64