First, I want to thank the development team for their hard work on Endeavour OS! I installed yesterday and I am really enjoying the experience so far. I have played around with ArcoLinux in the past, but Endeavour is the closest I have been to vanilla Arch in my Linux career (I’ve typically been a Debian-based guy).
A couple of questions:
Kalu - I am not familiar with this app. Is there a place I can read up on its use and how not to screw up my system with it?
Updates - I know I am responsible for thinking/reading before I update. What’s the best way to “do my homework” and update responsibly?
Install size - What should the install size of the OS be on my SSD?
When you update once a week and keep an eye out through the week on the forum is more than enough “homework”. Usually we or the community will submit a post when an update is borky or even break your system. Arch will even inform you when there’s a serious problem or an update needs manual intervention. Kalu sends those messages.
The root partition should be around 30 GB, that’s more than enough.
Good luck with your installation and don’t hesistate to ask a question.
After a weeks use I can say no probs with kalu; at first I thought what is this ‘noddy rubbish’ lol but now I like it’s quiet nature
Every morning it tells me if I have any updates…then I drop to the terminal ‘sudo pacman -Syu’
Had a few kernel updates with zero issues
I don’t use a swapfile anymore, whole ssd is ext4…with memory and usb3 drives so cheap, I just backup my /home drive to usb and it’s very fast
Something interesting I recently discovered ‘fstrim / -v’ - it cleaned up 173gb of data, my ssd is only 256gb and the OS was only taking up about 9gb at the time
Good luck and have fun!
I believe that command will manually TRIM the SSD. Example, I use the XFS FS on my SSD. I know it’s a cardinal sin but I recently started pushing EVERYTHING into a single, / partition. (Stopped using a separate /boot, / and /home partition)
I enabled the fstrim.timer service and my system runs a TRIM once a week… which is what that command is doing. I read a while back that the ‘discard’ option (when mounting an SSD in etc/fstab) can slow performance of your SSD and it’s better to manually invoke the command from time to time or use that fstrim.timer SystemD service and do it that way.
Actually i don’t think it’s so much of a Cardinal sin anymore to use a single / partition and i see it being used more. I also use ext4 as it is the defacto file system used mostly. Although some of the other file systems may be faster or provide other features they tend to be way more advanced than what’s needed by the average Linux user. More advanced=more complicated=more problems. As far as SSD drives are concerned IMHO i think it’s imperative that trim be used. SSD drives write differently than regular hard drives and will eventually prematurely wear out quicker than a normal hard drive if trim isn’t used. It also helps with speed as the space that it writes to is cleared and also helps with errors. Whether you set this up to be an automatic function or do it manually is a matter of choice. It’s already set up ready to go so why not use it. It just has to be enabled and started. If you are using a separate home partition i guess it needs an edit. But for those of us using strictly / it’s simple. It really boils down to choice. XFS is supposed to be faster.
@marlowe221 Nothing wrong with a Debian guy! Welcome to EndeavourOS. Kalu is short for Keep Arch Linux Updated. It is part of the apps included and is in the startup application settings so it launches when you boot up the system. You can right click on the Kalu icon and go into preferences if you like and you will see Arch Linux News is checked for both automatic check and manual check. If you like you can uncheck both of these as the messages for Arch news keep popping up on the desktop and a lot of it is older so if this becomes bothersome just uncheck both and save preferences. You can always check news manually by clicking on show unread Arch Linux news or show recent Arch Linux news. Kalu works fantastic and I’m using it on a number of installs. The advantage with Kalu is you will see all of the updates in front of you before you do any updating. This gives you a chance to look over the files or packages and take mental note also of the version number it’s updating from and to. It’s a great addition and i think it is better than pamac. (The GUI tool for pacman.) It is also very fast. I think you will find Endeavour to be as awesome as i think it is.
XFS file system was developed in the early 1990s by SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) and has a long history of running on extremely large servers and storage arrays. XFS has a reputation of operating in environments that require high performance and scalability and hence is routinely measured as one of the highest performing file systems on large systems with enterprise workloads.
EXT4 is better at handling large number of smaller files, and as @ricklinux said is the defacto file system in linux workstation distributions.
IMHO, for personal use workstations or home servers, EXT4, no LVM, no LUKS.
For Enterprise systems or SOHO with large files and large workloads XFS, probably LVM, possibly Encryption.
Now how about that! And here I thought the name Kalu was taken from Flash Gordon (the planet Mongo’s “Great God Kalu”). Just goes to show how much I know!
Since I installed pamac-aur yesterday I did uninstall kalu. No need for two update notifiers. That said it is a brilliant piece of software if you don’t have a graphical package manager installed.
I never used the built in updater in kalu anyway.
Reason I installed pamac was that I was switching from Cinnamon to Xfce and it is much easier to keep track of packages than in the terminal.
I installed pamac-aur because I find it easier to use than Kalu in finding the name(s) of new program(s). But I didn’t uninstall Kalu. What I did was to go into the Settings Manager->Session and Startup->Application Autostart [tab] and I unchecked Kalu and I unchecked Update Notifier (which is pamac-aur).
That way the programs are still “there” in the Applications Menu if and when I ever want to use them but they don’t start automatically and I am not bothered with a bunch of notifications or “urges” to update. (It was my wife who asked if it were possible to “get rid” of the indicators in the panel as they annoyed her.)
Doing this allows us get the notifications whenever we want, not when the programs want.
Welcome to EndeavourOS. Kalu is short for Keep Arch Linux Updated. It is part of the apps included and is in the startup application settings so it launches when you boot up the system. You can right click on the Kalu icon and go into preferences if you like and you will see Arch Linux News is checked for both automatic check and manual check. If you like you can uncheck both of these as the messages for Arch news keep popping up on the desktop and a lot of it is older so if this becomes bothersome just uncheck both and save preferences. You can always check news manually by clicking on show unread Arch Linux news or show recent Arch Linux news. Kalu works fantastic and I’m using it on a number of installs. The advantage with Kalu is you will see all of the updates in front of you before you do any updating. This gives you a chance to look over the files or packages and take mental note also of the version number it’s updating from and to. It’s a great addition and i think it is better than pamac. (The GUI tool for pacman.) It is also very fast. I think you will find Endeavour to be as awesome as i think it is.