7 ms·

Debian 10 Buster: First impressions on a 2017 laptop with an M.2 NVMe SSD

54 points by passthejoe 7y ago

vfclists 7y ago
I think you mean a 1 TB magnetic drive. I don't think the Debian 10 DVD itself fits on a 1GB DVD
- teilo 7y ago
  Yeah, we all knew what he meant, and felt no need to correct the obvious. Also, the Debian 10 netinstall ISO is 334MB, and is all I have ever used.
  - naikrovek 7y ago
    He cites the 1GB size TWICE, though...
wyldfire 7y ago
> I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it. It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance.
- mehhh 7y ago
  A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). Newer hard drives tend to be pretty snappy under Debian, unless your disk is degraded (eg: dying blocks causing I/O to chug, watch for SMART errors).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - wtallis 7y ago
    > A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). For sequential transfers, yes. But that's hardly ever the relevant figure for whether your system feels fast. You should be looking at the random read performance, where your hard drive is good for ~120 IOs per second and your SSD is good for several thousand at a minimum.
    - amichal 7y ago
      This. Last magnetic laptop drive I had was measuring under 10MB per second with small random reads. On a fragged old OS install it’s unbelievably impactful. Back in windows 98 days simply copying my data to a second partiton, erasing and reinstalling the OS and copying ALL the data back would get me back to like new for a few months. When a drive is nearly full “defrag” is not that successful. Similar things happen with nearly full SSDs via other mechanisms
      - wtallis 7y ago
        If you were getting multiple MB/s, then your random reads weren't particularly small. A 1TB 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive gives only 0.25–0.6MB/s for 4kB random reads depending on how much it is short stroked.
  - lathiat 7y ago
    The problem with HDDs is rarely the sequential speed but the IOPS; of which you get around 100 per second. The problem is that since the majority of machines have SSDs now developers no longer optimise the number of IOPS or care about it; or notice it at all - as SSDs have orders of magnitude more IOPS performance than a HDD. Combine that with many people having quite a few background programs that will spew IOPS randomly you'd be surprised how fast the disk gets slow. Even MacOS which until recently (and maybe even now) sells machines with a HDD as standard; with pretty much no extra software installed is unbearably unusable on a HDD. SSDs are basically required at this point.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    100MB/s of sequential transfers. Change that to 4k IO's and it can drop to 500KB/s on a laptop hard drive easily.
- realusername 7y ago
  > It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance. On Windows 10 it's definitely worse for sure. I don't know what they did since Win7 but it's pretty much unusable without an SSD now whereas a Debian would still run quite okay although slower.
  - IloveHN84 7y ago
    I feel the same with the switch from HDD to SSD on Mac.. without a SSD, MacOS is really slow
    - smnrchrds 7y ago
      And yet Apple still sells their base model 2019 iMacs with HDDs.
  - oweiler 7y ago
    In my case it was Windows Defender. Disabling it made a huge difference.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Linux might pull data off the disk less often than windows and mac.
  - throwaway8941 7y ago
    It's the "modern" WinRT applications for sure. When you're running a 5400 RPM HDD and the calculator application needs several seconds to cold start, you know they must have made some pretty terrible design decisions.
- 0815test 7y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. Linux still makes very good use of spinning rust media, and on a modern system with 2GB+ RAM (and a reasonably light distro like Debian) much of it ends up being used as disk cache so drive speeds aren't even that relevant. SSD's do speed up the boot process though, I'll give you that.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    The thing is they went from Windows on spinning rust to Linux on an SSD. * Modern windows has a really hard time on spinning rust, they'd have seen extreme performance improvements going to windows on an SSD * Linux deals better with spinning rust, they'd have seen performance improvements going to linux on spinning rust The SSD is still going to be most of the performance improvements. The gap between a 5400 HDD and an SSD (even more so NVMe) is just ridiculous on every single metric, there's orders of magnitude differences in throughput (especially on random reads or writes) and even more so latency and concurrency.
sitzkrieg 7y ago
> And hearing about arduous, days-long efforts to install Windows 10 on an M.2 SSD didn’t excite me about trying it. what? it works fine
- oblio 7y ago
  He just wanted to try out Debian, most likely :-)
- degski 7y ago
  Not using UEFI does not work that well, then you're back to MBR and the continual fight between Windows and GRUB. I run a dual boot Win10/Fedora30 system (UEFI on a SATA3 SSD), it's pretty good, both Windows and Fedora.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Why would you not use UEFI?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - majewsky 7y ago
      People seem to be afraid they get one of those broken UEFI implementations from 8-10 years ago. So they choose the BIOS Legacy mode which nowadays is more likely to be broken because of lack of testing.
- juangacovas 7y ago
  Not good hearing only "things" from biased people
derjames 7y ago
Long time Debian user here, since Debian 6. My main laptop is a Dell Inspiron 3000 AMD E2 6110 Quad core with integrated Radeon R2 8 GB RAM and Standard 500 Gb 5400RPM hard drive. The OS is Debian 10 with Gnome3(Previously the laptop had Debian 8). I just want to say that Debian 10 is fast in this hardware and I mean fast. The system is so responsive. Everything works and was properly detected. Everything is very polished. Extraordinary work from the Debian team.
- timc3 7y ago
  When you get a SSD you are going to kick yourself for not doing it sooner. Personally if i had that configuration I would stop what i was doing and go get one, unless of course it means not feeding your family.
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  It is fast - that was the first thing I noticed as well. About 1/2 an hour later the screen went black and the machine stopped responding to key presses. Eventually I resurrected by flipping to a text console and back, (Ctrl-Alt-F1, Crtl-Alt-F7). It turned out it was putting itself to sleep. After a few minutes. While on AC. And my fart arsing about wasn't fixing the problem - it was just soaking up time while X took its own sweet time to wake up (the text consoles were available immediately). And then this happened on other laptops I installed it on. Fixing it by disabling suspend when on AC is a nightmare. Every program + it's dog seems to have had a go at setting it - xscrensaver, window managers, display managers, X itself and systemd. Which one wins (ie the one you have to use to fix it, because it set it last) is a lottery. Maybe they can put fixing that mess on the list for bullseye.
maximente 7y ago
> I really don’t need the newest of everything, especially if my hardware is working well this sounds dubious if one has, say, a web browser installed or other consumer-type software. you almost surely want the latest security updates (which are for better or worse often packaged alongside cosmetic or other performance updates) for a piece of software like this. for this reason i've moved to a releaseless distro. the idea that i can't get the latest firefox without upgrading my "operating system" version to a new release seems harmful for most types of software: - imagine updating an app required you to upgrade your iOS/android version - imagine updating a plugin requires updating your browser etc. it's anti-modular and so i can't support it.
- octotoad 7y ago
  Security fixes are backported to Debian stable release packages. Any respectable, production-ready, stable/LTS distro does this. Obviously you don't get the new features and functionality that may be introduced in an upstream major release, but security patches are covered.
  - p1necone 7y ago
    The extra work (presumably it's non trivial) to do this could be spent on further hardening the current version if they didn't need to be supported though.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      Debian's current, supported version is the stable version. The reason why it's only released every two years and why it feels so 'old', is because it takes Debian Developers many months to "further harden" it before release. It wouldn't make sense to release it under a quicker schedule. Debian does offer "rolling" channels with prompt updates (testing, unstable) but those are officially not meant for real, production use.
      - p1necone 7y ago
        I'm not talking about Debian, I'm talking about the old versions of third party software shipped with Debian that have to continue being supported with security updates.
shmerl 7y ago
NVMe makes a huge difference to KDE login time. It's basically instant. On HDD it's excruciatingly slow, due to a ton of parallel I/O that happens during login process.
- Zardoz84 7y ago
  I login every day on KDE with a magnetic hard disk (Ubuntu 19.04), and the login time is really short (few seconds). Perhaps is your setup. Do you config to init a awful quantity of scripts/task at login ?
  - shmerl 7y ago
    It was more than 90 seconds for me. I'm not going back to HDD for $HOME for sure ;) Nothing special was configured. I also suspect, that splash screen was bugged. I always disable it now.
bbulkow 7y ago
Very surprised this made the front page. Everyone should have shifted to ssds years ago for laptops. The productivity win was a no brainer a very long time ago.
- r00fus 7y ago
  Going to an SSD is like going EV vs petrol car. You'll be blown away by how obviously inefficient decades-old technology feels. Even a cheaper SSD is much faster than a top-of-the-line HDD - and the analogy to EVs hold here as well.
  - juliusmusseau 7y ago
    Yes, I was running Windows 10 on a 7200rpm drive. Reinstalled onto a cheap $50 SATA 256GB SSD (AOPEN SU800): night and day difference. Blew me away. Obviously M.2 or NVME or PCIE would be a lot better. But even old SATA still made a huge difference.
- flukus 7y ago
  Last time I got a new laptop (which probably was a few years ago now) the price just wasn't reasonable for a large enough SSD, 512GB is my minimum for it's occasional multimedia uses and database work. Even now prices have apparently come down but larger drives often only come with high end SKU's. Looking at the MS Surface page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-2/8XQJKK3DD91B?crosssellid=surfacefamily4a&selectedColor=000000&preview=&previewModes= https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-...) 512GB is only available if I also get 16GB of RAM and a core i7 model, which is well beyond my needs and desire to pay for. 1TB is only comes with the silver model. So even my next laptop might feature spinning rust, if any exist. On the plus side HDD's add a level of chunkiness I like in laptops.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    The surface laptop is uniquely awful among windows laptops for how hard it is to replace anything. For a normal laptop, the cost of self-upgrading to a 1TB SSD is $100-$170, and it takes less than five minutes to install.
unlimit 7y ago
I run a AMD A8-7410 with 8GB RAM laptop from 2015. I too recently upgraded to a SSD. Unlike OP, mine is a internal SSD. The improvements have been ridiculous. The only regret is why I did not upgrade earlier. By the way, I don't think anything can help android studio. It has improved but gradle is still slow. edit: I too run debian buster.
- cuu508 7y ago
  Android Studio is heavy, but throwing hardware at it does help. With 8GB RAM I'd check if you're not reaching into swap already. Android Studio alone uses a good chunk of that. Then add an emulator, and a memory hungry browser, and you're swapping.
  - unlimit 7y ago
    Thanks for the tip, I will definitely look at it. I think I might as well get a decent Ryzen 3/5 desktop just for Android Studio.
dmix 7y ago
Using Gnome 3 was a performance problem? I've never really saw it that way. Even when I switched to tiling it was never a big motivation.
Zardoz84 7y ago
Faster that Windows! Don't looks impressive if Debian is running on a SDD and Windows on a magnetic hard disk. However, even on a magnetic hard disk, any modern Linux is more faster that Windows. Specially if is windows 10. I don't know what M$ did, but every time that I used Windows 10, I see it hitting very hard the hard disk without doing nothing.

54 points by passthejoe 7y ago

vfclists 7y ago

I think you mean a 1 TB magnetic drive. I don't think the Debian 10 DVD itself fits on a 1GB DVD

teilo 7y ago
Yeah, we all knew what he meant, and felt no need to correct the obvious. Also, the Debian 10 netinstall ISO is 334MB, and is all I have ever used.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  He cites the 1GB size TWICE, though...

wyldfire 7y ago

> I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it. It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance.

mehhh 7y ago
A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). Newer hard drives tend to be pretty snappy under Debian, unless your disk is degraded (eg: dying blocks causing I/O to chug, watch for SMART errors).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 7y ago
  > A 1TB laptop hard drive has ~100MB/s of I/O usually (unless its dying). For sequential transfers, yes. But that's hardly ever the relevant figure for whether your system feels fast. You should be looking at the random read performance, where your hard drive is good for ~120 IOs per second and your SSD is good for several thousand at a minimum.
  - amichal 7y ago
    This. Last magnetic laptop drive I had was measuring under 10MB per second with small random reads. On a fragged old OS install it’s unbelievably impactful. Back in windows 98 days simply copying my data to a second partiton, erasing and reinstalling the OS and copying ALL the data back would get me back to like new for a few months. When a drive is nearly full “defrag” is not that successful. Similar things happen with nearly full SSDs via other mechanisms
    - wtallis 7y ago
      If you were getting multiple MB/s, then your random reads weren't particularly small. A 1TB 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive gives only 0.25–0.6MB/s for 4kB random reads depending on how much it is short stroked.
- lathiat 7y ago
  The problem with HDDs is rarely the sequential speed but the IOPS; of which you get around 100 per second. The problem is that since the majority of machines have SSDs now developers no longer optimise the number of IOPS or care about it; or notice it at all - as SSDs have orders of magnitude more IOPS performance than a HDD. Combine that with many people having quite a few background programs that will spew IOPS randomly you'd be surprised how fast the disk gets slow. Even MacOS which until recently (and maybe even now) sells machines with a HDD as standard; with pretty much no extra software installed is unbearably unusable on a HDD. SSDs are basically required at this point.
- pixl97 7y ago
  100MB/s of sequential transfers. Change that to 4k IO's and it can drop to 500KB/s on a laptop hard drive easily.
realusername 7y ago
> It's mostly the SSD. Linux is great but the disk is a real choke point for a lot of system performance. On Windows 10 it's definitely worse for sure. I don't know what they did since Win7 but it's pretty much unusable without an SSD now whereas a Debian would still run quite okay although slower.
- IloveHN84 7y ago
  I feel the same with the switch from HDD to SSD on Mac.. without a SSD, MacOS is really slow
  - smnrchrds 7y ago
    And yet Apple still sells their base model 2019 iMacs with HDDs.
- oweiler 7y ago
  In my case it was Windows Defender. Disabling it made a huge difference.
- ianai 7y ago
  Linux might pull data off the disk less often than windows and mac.
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  It's the "modern" WinRT applications for sure. When you're running a 5400 RPM HDD and the calculator application needs several seconds to cold start, you know they must have made some pretty terrible design decisions.
0815test 7y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Linux still makes very good use of spinning rust media, and on a modern system with 2GB+ RAM (and a reasonably light distro like Debian) much of it ends up being used as disk cache so drive speeds aren't even that relevant. SSD's do speed up the boot process though, I'll give you that.
- masklinn 7y ago
  The thing is they went from Windows on spinning rust to Linux on an SSD. * Modern windows has a really hard time on spinning rust, they'd have seen extreme performance improvements going to windows on an SSD * Linux deals better with spinning rust, they'd have seen performance improvements going to linux on spinning rust The SSD is still going to be most of the performance improvements. The gap between a 5400 HDD and an SSD (even more so NVMe) is just ridiculous on every single metric, there's orders of magnitude differences in throughput (especially on random reads or writes) and even more so latency and concurrency.

sitzkrieg 7y ago

> And hearing about arduous, days-long efforts to install Windows 10 on an M.2 SSD didn’t excite me about trying it. what? it works fine

oblio 7y ago
He just wanted to try out Debian, most likely :-)
degski 7y ago
Not using UEFI does not work that well, then you're back to MBR and the continual fight between Windows and GRUB. I run a dual boot Win10/Fedora30 system (UEFI on a SATA3 SSD), it's pretty good, both Windows and Fedora.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Why would you not use UEFI?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - majewsky 7y ago
    People seem to be afraid they get one of those broken UEFI implementations from 8-10 years ago. So they choose the BIOS Legacy mode which nowadays is more likely to be broken because of lack of testing.
juangacovas 7y ago
Not good hearing only "things" from biased people

derjames 7y ago

Long time Debian user here, since Debian 6. My main laptop is a Dell Inspiron 3000 AMD E2 6110 Quad core with integrated Radeon R2 8 GB RAM and Standard 500 Gb 5400RPM hard drive. The OS is Debian 10 with Gnome3(Previously the laptop had Debian 8). I just want to say that Debian 10 is fast in this hardware and I mean fast. The system is so responsive. Everything works and was properly detected. Everything is very polished. Extraordinary work from the Debian team.

timc3 7y ago
When you get a SSD you are going to kick yourself for not doing it sooner. Personally if i had that configuration I would stop what i was doing and go get one, unless of course it means not feeding your family.
rstuart4133 7y ago
It is fast - that was the first thing I noticed as well. About 1/2 an hour later the screen went black and the machine stopped responding to key presses. Eventually I resurrected by flipping to a text console and back, (Ctrl-Alt-F1, Crtl-Alt-F7). It turned out it was putting itself to sleep. After a few minutes. While on AC. And my fart arsing about wasn't fixing the problem - it was just soaking up time while X took its own sweet time to wake up (the text consoles were available immediately). And then this happened on other laptops I installed it on. Fixing it by disabling suspend when on AC is a nightmare. Every program + it's dog seems to have had a go at setting it - xscrensaver, window managers, display managers, X itself and systemd. Which one wins (ie the one you have to use to fix it, because it set it last) is a lottery. Maybe they can put fixing that mess on the list for bullseye.

maximente 7y ago

> I really don’t need the newest of everything, especially if my hardware is working well this sounds dubious if one has, say, a web browser installed or other consumer-type software. you almost surely want the latest security updates (which are for better or worse often packaged alongside cosmetic or other performance updates) for a piece of software like this. for this reason i've moved to a releaseless distro. the idea that i can't get the latest firefox without upgrading my "operating system" version to a new release seems harmful for most types of software: - imagine updating an app required you to upgrade your iOS/android version - imagine updating a plugin requires updating your browser etc. it's anti-modular and so i can't support it.

octotoad 7y ago
Security fixes are backported to Debian stable release packages. Any respectable, production-ready, stable/LTS distro does this. Obviously you don't get the new features and functionality that may be introduced in an upstream major release, but security patches are covered.
- p1necone 7y ago
  The extra work (presumably it's non trivial) to do this could be spent on further hardening the current version if they didn't need to be supported though.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    Debian's current, supported version is the stable version. The reason why it's only released every two years and why it feels so 'old', is because it takes Debian Developers many months to "further harden" it before release. It wouldn't make sense to release it under a quicker schedule. Debian does offer "rolling" channels with prompt updates (testing, unstable) but those are officially not meant for real, production use.
    - p1necone 7y ago
      I'm not talking about Debian, I'm talking about the old versions of third party software shipped with Debian that have to continue being supported with security updates.

shmerl 7y ago

NVMe makes a huge difference to KDE login time. It's basically instant. On HDD it's excruciatingly slow, due to a ton of parallel I/O that happens during login process.

Zardoz84 7y ago
I login every day on KDE with a magnetic hard disk (Ubuntu 19.04), and the login time is really short (few seconds). Perhaps is your setup. Do you config to init a awful quantity of scripts/task at login ?
- shmerl 7y ago
  It was more than 90 seconds for me. I'm not going back to HDD for $HOME for sure ;) Nothing special was configured. I also suspect, that splash screen was bugged. I always disable it now.

bbulkow 7y ago

Very surprised this made the front page. Everyone should have shifted to ssds years ago for laptops. The productivity win was a no brainer a very long time ago.

r00fus 7y ago
Going to an SSD is like going EV vs petrol car. You'll be blown away by how obviously inefficient decades-old technology feels. Even a cheaper SSD is much faster than a top-of-the-line HDD - and the analogy to EVs hold here as well.
- juliusmusseau 7y ago
  Yes, I was running Windows 10 on a 7200rpm drive. Reinstalled onto a cheap $50 SATA 256GB SSD (AOPEN SU800): night and day difference. Blew me away. Obviously M.2 or NVME or PCIE would be a lot better. But even old SATA still made a huge difference.
flukus 7y ago
Last time I got a new laptop (which probably was a few years ago now) the price just wasn't reasonable for a large enough SSD, 512GB is my minimum for it's occasional multimedia uses and database work. Even now prices have apparently come down but larger drives often only come with high end SKU's. Looking at the MS Surface page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-2/8XQJKK3DD91B?crosssellid=surfacefamily4a&selectedColor=000000&preview=&previewModes= https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-...) 512GB is only available if I also get 16GB of RAM and a core i7 model, which is well beyond my needs and desire to pay for. 1TB is only comes with the silver model. So even my next laptop might feature spinning rust, if any exist. On the plus side HDD's add a level of chunkiness I like in laptops.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  The surface laptop is uniquely awful among windows laptops for how hard it is to replace anything. For a normal laptop, the cost of self-upgrading to a 1TB SSD is $100-$170, and it takes less than five minutes to install.

unlimit 7y ago

I run a AMD A8-7410 with 8GB RAM laptop from 2015. I too recently upgraded to a SSD. Unlike OP, mine is a internal SSD. The improvements have been ridiculous. The only regret is why I did not upgrade earlier. By the way, I don't think anything can help android studio. It has improved but gradle is still slow. edit: I too run debian buster.

cuu508 7y ago
Android Studio is heavy, but throwing hardware at it does help. With 8GB RAM I'd check if you're not reaching into swap already. Android Studio alone uses a good chunk of that. Then add an emulator, and a memory hungry browser, and you're swapping.
- unlimit 7y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I will definitely look at it. I think I might as well get a decent Ryzen 3/5 desktop just for Android Studio.

dmix 7y ago

Using Gnome 3 was a performance problem? I've never really saw it that way. Even when I switched to tiling it was never a big motivation.

Zardoz84 7y ago

Faster that Windows! Don't looks impressive if Debian is running on a SDD and Windows on a magnetic hard disk. However, even on a magnetic hard disk, any modern Linux is more faster that Windows. Specially if is windows 10. I don't know what M$ did, but every time that I used Windows 10, I see it hitting very hard the hard disk without doing nothing.