What things do you know that would be really good to do with freshly installed system? Or things that you wish had done earlier?
on my server? Cockpit
Cockpit is great! I learned about it recently and immediately tried it out on a lab machine, and shortly after deployed it across my systems.
I just learned about it now!
Link to the project for others who are interested
Install Bottles and HeoricGamesLauncher.
Put home on a different drive from the get go.
Put home on a different drive from the get go.
Explain why?
Originally I had the OS and home on a 256GB SSD. Now the OS is on a 256GB SSD and home is on a 1TB SSD.
I can also completely wipe away the drive with the OS on it. Reinstall the same distro or install a different distro, point fstab to that drive, and bam all my home files are right there.
btrfs with grub-btrfs and Timeshift to have cheap automatic snapshots so I can boot from and restore the most recent snapshot when I inevitably mess something up and would otherwise have to reinstall or spend hours troubleshooting.
Looks like someone on github even created a script to automatically install and configure grub-btrfs and snapper on Fedora.
I had great luck with this tutorial for Mint, but didn’t bother with the steps after configuring the snapshots because the preceding sections get me everything I want. Works quite well, and makes Mint even more solid than it already is.
https://www.dvlv.co.uk/making-linux-mint-a-pretend-immutable-distro-with-btrfs-and-timeshift.html
if you have btrfs as the filesystem, try filesystem compression. if you have stuff which can benefit from compression, it can reduce disk usage significantly.
if you format a new partition, add compression as a mount flag (zstd, level 3).
if you already have a system without compression, do something like
sudo btrfs filesystem defragment -r -v -czstd "path_to_file_or_folder"do check properly in btrfs docs (this command is not that unsafe, but any file system operation has some inherent risk, so please do it carefully).
you trade disk read speeds and slight cpu usage (less than 1-2%), but if you do not have something that io speed dependent, it is great. (imagine things like game folders, or root /usr dir which has packages)
Setup zram if your OS doesn’t already
- rollback from grub
- rpm-ostree reset
I’m on Bazzite, first time doing wacky stuff like a year and half or so ago… ended up in an unnecessary reinstall.
