In my experience with F40 Fedora KDE “spin” uses double RAM when idle than Fedora Gnome “workstation” and that happens mostly because of “Kontact” suite, there is something eating RAM connected to the “calendar” feature.
That said, depending on the usage, I guess most of the RAM is used by the browser because of the very nature of today’s Internet. Even more so when there are several or many “tabs” opened. Right now I have Firefox using 2Giga of RAM with only three tabs.
Adding RAM makes things better for sure.
But I have been using low end computers all my life so for me it is “natural” to save RAM by any means possible, for example I have set Gnome Software so it DOES NOT open on boot, it is still available on demand. It required some searching because Gnome folks DID NOT add an option, probably thinking RAM is cheap nowadays. I still think wasting RAM for something that does nothing but being idle is nonsense.
Well that confirms a long-suspicion I had about Btrfs
I want backups handled manually and don’t need my filesystem copying on write or whatever Btrfs’s advantage is, along with LVM. ext4 is tried-and-true, and even XFS I guess is ok since RHEL defaults to it.
Some claim XFS is better for servers, but AFAIK no one says that about regular workstations.
In fact fedora server uses XFS while the workstation versions all seem to be pushing btrfs.
I personally still use ext4 with LVM and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
EXT4 is much easier for management for the administrator than XFS so it is my filesystem of choice.
I really doin’t understand half of the references above (toram, btfs, ext4 etc).
I see btfs relates to some kind of file system and someone above mentioned more about it, here it is:
That’s way over my head, but I will soon be installing Fedora on a ‘new’ laptop, so maybe I should learn about this.
When I formatted before install (which I always do with any new OS) i used the default settings, i looked at custom settings and it seemed to complicated for me so I stuck with defaults. Maybe I should rethink that next time?
BTRFS, EXT4, F2FS, ZFS, XFS etc. are all filesystems.
toram is some edge case feature for things like Tails, Clonezilla or small Linux distros, to load their entire content to the RAM. This means you can boot from USB and then pull out the USB stick with theoretically no consequences.
I also use Fedoras default partition scheme which uses BTRFS. It is not that complicated though.
You could do something else but this is the supported one and it works well.
BTRFS (pronounced Butterfus, lol) itself is more complex, sophisticated, and therefore possibly more trouble than ext4. It’s true that most users might not ever have to manage theirs (or even check remaining free space), but the threat is there. ext4 is relatively simple and generally hands-off. Unfortunately, the Fedora installer is very poorly designed UI-wise, and changing the defaults on the partitioning/filesystems options can be less than intuitive, to put it mildly. I tend to stick with ext4 for now. I may try BCACHEFS when it’s been “out” a while.
My imac 14,2 with 8GB RAM and the default install settings installed on an external USB3 drive runs well (and faster than it did with either of the two internal drives) for email, forums, online “research” and light programming. I try to stay with the installer defaults as most users share the same configuration. This make makes troubleshooting easier (fewer posts needed to pin down configuration details) and problem solutions are directly useful to a larger share of the community.
You still have not provided data needed to make an informed decision. Here is some data for my system with 3 mass storage devices that should be comparable to what you can expect Note that I’m also using Fedora 40 Workstation with a default install and a core i5 CPU.
These are far from comprehensive tests, but I find Fedora boots faster and is generally more responsive using the USB3 drive. The internal SSD drive is not far behind, but has errors (after being overheated on a hot summer day).
Please check that your SSD performance is similar to what I get with the two SSD drives.
Joey, you asked about the RAM.
If you add more RAM you can fit more stuff in it without forcing the system to make room by swapping some things in some other places.
So yes, it helps.
It is like adding another seat row on your car, you can put more people inside and move them around. The car stays the same then. More comfortable but it doesn’t become a rocket.
The above data speak about the “discs” which are not old mechanical discs but solid state memories that work like old discs. The system read/write on those “discs” so the faster they are, for any reason, the better the system performs. This is the reason why mechanical discs have been replaced by SSD.
To get the same information you must copy the above commands in your terminal. Or not.
So hparm is not installed. You can install it with sudo dnf install hdparm. Same with htop or anything else you may need to investigate your issue, assuming it’s packaged in fedora repos. With htop, after you install it, you just run it in the terminal by typing htop and hitting enter. Midnight Commander is also nice to have, in general, but the package and binary are called mc.
Also, you may want to run lsblk or sudo blkid to get the “lay of the land” in regards to your disks, partitions, and filesystems of your computer before running provided example commands referencing partitions or similar.
You don’t need to get anything – the tools you need are all part of F40 Workstation. Gnome provides “Terminal”. You can start the terminal program using and then entering “Terminal”. There GUI benchmark programs, but disk benchmarks require elevated privileges and the default Gnome configuration won’t allow root access to GUI (for good reasons).
Never blindly enter commands found in forum posts without checking the documentation. In Terminal you can view documentation for the sudo, hdparm and other command-line programs mentioned in this topic. Just enter man <command> in Terminal. You may find [Linux Command](https://linuxcommand.org> helpful.
