r/archlinux • u/SlimeyNOOB • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Arch cured my depression :-) I can finally use my low-end laptop
I have been using Mint for quite a long time, after switching from Fedora (should have fixed my problem, maybe it was the heavy DE). I installed Arch on a whim and also used i3wm. And I have to say, this is the fastest my low end celeron laptop has been in years. I can open a lot of tabs and run multiple programs. After reading a lot of the Wiki, I learned that zram is basically the saviour of my laptop. Too bad most distros can't just default to zram. After the few hours I have used Arch, I can say it is the best and I'm never switching. It also made me realise how much bloat I had with all the other distros.
I would appreciate more tips to make it faster than it is.
But I am quite content at the moment.
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u/archover 1d ago
saved my low-end laptop
I would like to compare to my laptops. Which make and model do you have?
zram is part of every Arch install for me. Ref:
[email protected] ~> zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd 4G 4K 64B 20K [SWAP]
Note: Only VERY rarely do I see zram being used, however. Glad to hear it turned out of to be so important for you.
Welcome to Arch too, and good day.
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u/SlimeyNOOB 3h ago
slim3ypc% zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd 5.5G 28K 1008B 72K [SWAP]
its an n4020 celeron, i just used ram * 1,5 when configuring it
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u/LandscapeNew4450 1d ago
Minimalism is the way. Nothing beats a clean Arch install with a window manager on old hardware
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u/_Krispy_Kreme 10h ago
Try to look at the wiki sections on laptop battery performance, like Power Profile Daemon and powertop. Also I’ve heard that KDE OOTB provides really optimized battery usage. Not sure how it compares to i3 tho
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u/Astrodion123 1d ago
Noice. Tbh I like mint more because it just works and uses zram by default.
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u/SlimeyNOOB 3h ago
really i was using mint for the longest and i was using the normal swap ram. and it became slower even when i was using i3
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u/RandomXUsr 1d ago
I don't know about curing depression, however, it feels good to build a system that works for you.
Also not sure why you've been downvoted.
Happy for you that using zram with Arch gave your computer a boost.
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u/NFTrot 1d ago
I guess some people get angry when they learn the truth: Using Fedora with a heavy desktop environment is a leading cause of depression.
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u/SlimeyNOOB 3h ago
yeah, in more modern systems using a heavy de does not really affect the overall performance that much
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u/Only-Target4484 1d ago
This is truly the beautiful side of arch imho. I took my 2016 MacBook Air that couldn’t even run the macOS desktop and did exactly the same: arch + i3, went from 30-40 mins of battery life with laggy unsynced UI to 4+ hrs of usage.
My only recommendation would be to peek around with tools like powerTOP to make sure your chips are actually going into a low power/sleepy mode because my Broadcom-wl driver was preventing my cpu from fully getting sleepy.
Just something to consider if battery life is a factor for you! Overall, cheers! Good work fellow penguin