3 ms·

I just got my first System 76 laptop a couple of weeks ago. TBH, I knew they shipped their own Linux distro, but I kinda assumed the first thing I would do woul

I just got my first System 76 laptop a couple of weeks ago. TBH, I knew they shipped their own Linux distro, but I kinda assumed the first thing I would do would be to wipe everything and install Fedora or Arch or something. In the end, I wanted to play around with the machine a bit, so I left Pop!OS on, "at least for a little while". Once I got in there and switched my desktop environment to KDE Plasma, and realized that Pop!OS is apparently derived from Ubuntu, I started thinking I might keep it around. After a couple of weeks of use, so far it seems fine. Maybe the only thing I find slightly annoying is that the machines don't ship with the drives setup with LVM. Of course LVM is there if you want to use it, and that's not a slight on the OS, just the default configuration. Anyway... consider this something of a tentative endorsement of Pop! from me. I need to use it a while longer, but so far so good.

ArchD 5y ago
What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Adding physical volumes to the logical volumes is not a big use case for laptops with limited space for expansion. As for encryption, it can be done without LVM.
- chfnhhxjs 5y ago
  LVM makes encrypted swap (and thus encrypted hibernation) way easier.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap on a 16 GB+ machine and sleep it instead of hibernating it?
    - LanternLight83 5y ago
      Hibernation has always felt more stable and complete to me, all the session-preservation advantages of sleeping but you still the machine go cold, lights out. Also a fan of hybrid sleep. > Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap . . . ? In addition to preferences for hibernation, I'm a firm believer that there's a time and a place for swapping, and that one's system is worse off for lacking that option. I may not push my system's memory limits like I used to, but I certainly have pushed through 16GB, and don't like the idea that there wouldn't be a fallback like ZRAM or swap-space backing up the OOM daemon, which I'd rather didn't kill my processes in all but the most dire of circumstances. Some amount of swapping will be done by the kernel, even on a 64GB machine with memory to spare, and without the time to do my research tonight, I trust that the kernel delelopers had solid arguments for implementing the behaviors behind that baseline swap usage. You could make the argument that a swapfile will work just fine, and if you're not going for hibernation that just a few gigs is all you need. Live the flexibility of swap files. I wonder if you could put that behind an encrypted block device within another filesystem, ecryptfs-style. I've been using a proper swap partition (just a hair larger than RAM, for hibernation) since the late oughts, and, ZRAM aside, am well-and-truely stuck in my ways.
    - kzemek 5y ago
      Related article that popped up sometime ago on HN: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
- stonogo 5y ago
  Snapshots.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Probably nothing that you can't do, but I bought a machine with lots of storage space, spread over three physical devices, and I'm just accustomed to using LVM to manage things. It's not exactly a "Big Deal" or anything. Just something that jumped out to me based on my pre-existing biases.
cat199 5y ago
somewhat in the same boat - also ended up staying - at this point I'd recommend pop OS on end-user devices in place of ubuntu since it has a few nice things for polish (boot to recovery partition, various UI tweaks) and doesn't really deviate from base ubuntu much otherwise also, a plug for system76 - used to play the whole dmesg-device-support-lottery with laptops; feels good paying a small premium to avoid this and support a company who is helping the ecosystem instead of throwing away whatever ms license fee & hours of system tweaking I'd be paying otherwise.

ArchD 5y ago

What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Adding physical volumes to the logical volumes is not a big use case for laptops with limited space for expansion. As for encryption, it can be done without LVM.

chfnhhxjs 5y ago
LVM makes encrypted swap (and thus encrypted hibernation) way easier.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap on a 16 GB+ machine and sleep it instead of hibernating it?
  - LanternLight83 5y ago
    Hibernation has always felt more stable and complete to me, all the session-preservation advantages of sleeping but you still the machine go cold, lights out. Also a fan of hybrid sleep. > Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap . . . ? In addition to preferences for hibernation, I'm a firm believer that there's a time and a place for swapping, and that one's system is worse off for lacking that option. I may not push my system's memory limits like I used to, but I certainly have pushed through 16GB, and don't like the idea that there wouldn't be a fallback like ZRAM or swap-space backing up the OOM daemon, which I'd rather didn't kill my processes in all but the most dire of circumstances. Some amount of swapping will be done by the kernel, even on a 64GB machine with memory to spare, and without the time to do my research tonight, I trust that the kernel delelopers had solid arguments for implementing the behaviors behind that baseline swap usage. You could make the argument that a swapfile will work just fine, and if you're not going for hibernation that just a few gigs is all you need. Live the flexibility of swap files. I wonder if you could put that behind an encrypted block device within another filesystem, ecryptfs-style. I've been using a proper swap partition (just a hair larger than RAM, for hibernation) since the late oughts, and, ZRAM aside, am well-and-truely stuck in my ways.
  - kzemek 5y ago
    Related article that popped up sometime ago on HN: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
stonogo 5y ago
Snapshots.
mindcrime 5y ago
What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Probably nothing that you can't do, but I bought a machine with lots of storage space, spread over three physical devices, and I'm just accustomed to using LVM to manage things. It's not exactly a "Big Deal" or anything. Just something that jumped out to me based on my pre-existing biases.

cat199 5y ago

somewhat in the same boat - also ended up staying - at this point I'd recommend pop OS on end-user devices in place of ubuntu since it has a few nice things for polish (boot to recovery partition, various UI tweaks) and doesn't really deviate from base ubuntu much otherwise also, a plug for system76 - used to play the whole dmesg-device-support-lottery with laptops; feels good paying a small premium to avoid this and support a company who is helping the ecosystem instead of throwing away whatever ms license fee & hours of system tweaking I'd be paying otherwise.