My guess is some firmware or modules that just makes it that big and if you want room for snapshots you need to resize (or uninstall some variant if not needed). OS installer might have too small default size for a setup like this.
300MBish for a kernel is totally normal and you have 3 variants installed.
Here, you dropped this: /*
BTW ncdu -x /boot
Partitioning in the Debian installer being half-broken is something nobody talks about but IME still a thing.
What do is step through the installer to the point where you’re at, ctrl+F* to get a shell, set it up manually using fdisk/mdadm/lvm/cryptsetup/mkfs, and then back again to rescan and just assign the mounts and filesystems
I think I still have a half-written guide for just this in drafts somewhere actually. If you get stuck you can DM and maybe I dig something up
Debian has this (well, for sources at least) and I think it’s somewhere between 20-30 DVD images for actually-everything. Maybe not something for the day-to-day but great to keep on hand for preppers and the paranoid (:
Ventoy is risky and a bit sus for such a security-critical software.
Glim is another solution for ISO-multiboot-USB that doesn’t require as much trust.
QuickEmu makes distrohopping in VMs easy.
The concept is attractive.
Since back before “atomic” and “immutable” were fashionable buzzwords, I’ve had a few Alpine installations running something like this. Their installer supports it. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Immutable_root_with_atomic_upgrades
I guess I’m also not alone in having been running OpenWrt with atomic upgrades for many years.
Since then been running a ublue fork (Aurora) for a while now. Forking it and running the builds on my own infra instead of relying on their GitHub works after hacking up the workflow files but it’s quite redudandant and inefficient with IMO one too many intermediate layers (kinoite -> akmods -> main -> aurora/silverblue/bazzite -> iso) downloading the same things multiple times repeatedly despite spending considerable overhead on caching. It’s clear that building outside of their GitHub org is not really actively supported.
Also tried openSUSE microOS (Aeon) a year or two back for a while. I want to like it but find zypper and transactional-update pretty uncomfortable and TBH sometimes still confusing to work with. Installing it on encrypted RAID was daunting IIRC. Rough edges. Enough out-of-date docs on the official site to make Debian wiki look like ArchWiki in comparison.
KDE Linux looks promising but it was still in a very early and undocumented stage last I looked. Great to see the progress.
More recently been looking more at Arkane Linux and been using it for some months now. It’s an immutable with Arch base. Much easier to customize and maintain than the ublue options and a lot less time spent triggering and waiting for builds - while having less stuff pulled from third-party servers in the process and an easy way to fork packages by cloning and submoduling an AUR repo. Lot more straightforward to make work without relying on GitHub. If you’re looking at rolling your own builds and are comfortable with Arch, I highly recommend checking it out. My fav so far.
https://codeberg.org/arkanelinux/arkdep
Given the self-contained nature of Debian - cloning the Debian sources is enough to do a complete offline build of everything - I think it’d be the most interesting base for a sustainable immutable distro unless you go to the opposite end with “distroless” (no comment). Looking forward to one.
It’s not as black and white as they say. Flatpak is not a bad choice per se but not without tradeoffs and they can come with catches like this because of the security model. There is no one-size-fits-everyone here. If you want all your apps to have access to everything your user does and value convenience over the sandboxing, flatpaks might not be the best choice for your situation. Also like for any repo with external third-party uploads, quality varies a lot between apps and maintainers on flathub. Some are excellent and some are in a sorry state. Before installing from fllathub its a good idea to some basic due diligence on the package and maintainer before jumping in.
I agree with the IanTwenty that the UX has room for improvement in making it more obvious what’s going on and making it easier to manage customizations and overrides. For the time being, getting comfortable with Flatseal and learning more about Flatpaks seems like the best way for a user to make it work for them if defaults don’t work out.
Flatpak has tradeoffs and whatever is on flathub is not guaranteed to always be your best pick. That doesn’t make it Bad. Going as far as calling them harmful in general is hyperbole. It can still be a great option for many users.
Turning off swap could make things much worse though
How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)
Anecdotally, this maneuver can help tremendously tonrecover responsiveness in some cases. I guess the overall sitiation could be improved by tweaking vm.swappiness.
Hence:
After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again
If it’s like the last htop image should be no problem.
Apart from what others said about power/throttling, I wonder if the filled up memory during the upgrade (or other memory-heavy use) pushes some central pages to swap and then they stay there after?
After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again you can force back everything to RAM by temporarily disabling swap:
swapoff $swapdev && swapon $swapdev
To list swap devices, just run swapon.
Also switching to an X11 window manager can be quite a lot snappier than modern GNOME for older hardware. You could try Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, or KDE with the X session.
If it’s not throttling/thernals, I wouldn’t be surprised if those two together is what made things worse after migrating dist.
If you’ve been swapping heavily over time you might also want to check disk health with smartctl and check that you don’t have related errors in dmesg.
If you press tab in htop you can also see if there is high IO load going on.
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For a system actually using ~16GB I don’t think a 120GB drive is “way too small” for the root but just on the generous side of just about right assuming there’s nothing more than boot and swap on it otherwise.
Moving /home to a separate drive while keeping the root intact has a few upsides compared to moving everything to one bigger drive.
The built-in rollback functionality doesn’t hurt either.
More than that I think it’s a prerequisite for doing this.
You could self-host a shared “source of truth” git repo that you access over ssh or filesystem. That can be anything from a USB thumb drive, a small clean server or a container on your existing desktop with ssh access, to an entire Forgejo deployment. Then you only need the “secret zero” of an ssh key to get everything set up and syncable.
If fresh setup is more common, you probably have other parts like package installation and network configuration that you also want to automate. Enter configuration management like ansible or salt, image builders like packer or archiso, “immutable” solutions like Nix or rpm-ostree. Once you get there you typically manage that in git anyway and you could put your dotfiles repo as a submodule and copy them over as part of OS setup.
If it’s just for once in a blue moon, manual ad-hoc copying gets you pretty far.
No matter how you slice it I think you have to either frequently spend time syncing changes or just accept the drift and divergence between machines and the sources.
Wishful thinking and stretching the definition beyond meaningfulness with regards to your conclusion. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Don’t delude each other.
Still, I’ve believed for a long time that the tipping point with an increasing trajectory is around 5% so pretty optimistic about recent trends.
Your initial instinct was right, you do want to auto-apply security fixes.
unattended-upgrades does allow you to configure this somewhat.
You could try this https://feddit.online/post/1359926#comment_6688858
Doesn’t sound like this is screen blanking as it happens during use but to rule it out you could temporarily disable that with xset -dpms and xset s off on X11. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Display_Power_Management_Signaling#Xorg
Right, there’s the immutable root aspect. Guessing the other answer you got fills in the missing piece there and that Silverblue perhaps mounts the system flatpaks on a different r/w filesystem than the read-only /. Check output of mount to see.
At the end of the day it’s up to you if you prefer to keep the system clean and run flatpak unprivileged, or centralize updates under root.
The one catch I can think of with flatpak --user is that it obviously won’t work if /home is mounted with noexec, which is otherwise a good security measure (and IMO not doing that defeats a lot of the security wins of immutable distros). Unless you apply the same mounting strategy to the flatpak xdg user dirs, which is certainly an option but not something everyone will bother with. But then again maybe that’s exactly what you want anyway to make your Flatpak installations smoothly portable across distros.
Hyprland and Niri aren’t even DEs. That’s up to the user to sort out, if they want one. So yeah not the best first picks for a beginner who just wants their damn desktop experience now please.