It is part of their kernel. And there are a few different schedulers at play, you have the CPU one as well as the I/O one. Arch Linux has various different kernels (such as the zen one) that use different CPU schedulers (with lots of options in the AUR as well) and there are various settings you can tweak for different I/O ones.
I general you should go through the Improving performance wiki page on the details for these and even more performance tweaks you can do.
There is also pages for tuning things for better battery life for laptops as well that you may also find interesting.
Faster here has many different meanings. The tests in that benchmark are more batch processing tasks. But that is not the only measure of speed. Zen I believe is more tuned for desktop use and keeping the system in a more snappy state which comes at the cost of some raw throughout performance. There is forever a tradeoff between latency and throughput, optimising for one is generally done at the expense of the other and both are optimising for performance, just different kinds.
I only mentioned zen as one of the official alternative kernels that is worth a look at though, making no claims as to if it the best for anyones particular workloads.
This is why it is best to do your own benchmarks for the stuff you care about and pick the best solution for your situation.
Arch wiki to the rescue. I swear the forms of arch Linux must just be riddled with references to the wiki. Eventually I’ll learn that it just knows. Thanks for the response.
Aren’t you sorta trusting whoever wrote any package you install with root? I mean, you should have that attitude anyhow as packages have a huge attack surface so privilege escalation bugs are way more common than remote execution but still, flatpak and snap at least offer a bit of a sandbox which might improve…
Depends on your distro and what’s available in the repo. With default repos you’re more trusting the distro developer to vet packages.
I trust debian for that. It’s been a while since I used Ubuntu so I don’t remember how their repos are set up but the debian team is notoriously conservative with their repos.
The track record has been very good as far as i know with thousands of packages over the years so I doubt if there is a real problem to be solved here.
APT is not good at managing dependency hell. This is a common problem for all package managers that don’t typically bundle dependencies. You can get 30000 open source packages from trusted sources having a maintainer working on each to all share the same dependencies for an OS release. That’s what Debian does. However it’s a lot of work and that works increases significantly when you try to do it for a piece of software across OS releases.
Read - it’s difficult for LibreOffice or Mozilla to ship a new version of their software that works on several Debian or Ubuntu releases. It’s also difficult for maintainers to do that.
You could of course include dependencies in debs, but then you’re increasing the security attack surface of the OS, because there’s no sandbox around those bundled dependencies. Bundling dependencies requires sandboxing to be safe. Otherwise whenever there’s a security hole in one library in package X, package X might patch it, but the same library might exist in another 50 packages on the system unpatched.
This is a solved problem. It was done in Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10 and probably others. All OSes that had to deal with more than 30000 packages, open source or proprietary, from trusted or untrusted sources. Bundle non-system dependencies and confine in a sandbox. Snap’s been doing this ever since it was called Click. Flatpak didn’t have the sandbox part for a while if I’m not mistaken. I’m not sure what its current sandbox state is.
There are other issues with APT/deb but managing dependencies without sandboxing is probably the most fundamental one since dependency management is one their fundamental purposes.
Windows 10 is a lot more than just a skin for Windows 7. Just like all the Linux packages dependencies, All the individual libraries for Windows update. How things work changes all the time when security vulnerabilities are found.
Yes, they’ll stop supporting older packages and kernels. No reason not to. In situations where it’s needed, like LTS distros, they get security fixes backported to them and that’s about it. Not really daily driver stuff.
A .deb relies on other packages, so a modern Firefox package will not be installable on an ancient OS. With Ubuntu Pro, Ubuntu 16.04 will still get updates until 2026, so I think you would get Firefox from Ubuntu until then. But there’s no chance you would get a modern Firefox for 7.10 or 8.04.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you would like to cling to an ancient version of Linux. You don’t like the new desktop or anything else that comes with the new version? Then you can install another desktop or another distribution.
Yeah. You can forget the .deb packages. They need dependencies and c libraries and stuff. After 2-5 years it becomes difficult and then impossible to install. You might be better off with some package format like flatpak. Or maybe better yet: the plain executable. probably with statically linked libraries. I think that should work for quite a while.
There are programs out there that come in a single executable file without requirements. they’re supposed to run from an usb stick and without installation. I think you should try those. they should be pretty self contained.
Other than that… I second the question. Why do you want something like an ancient operating system combined with a brand new browser? The OS will have hundreds of security issues. And in case someone does something like plug in a recent usb stick to save some files, it won’t recognize the format because exfat or something wasn’t yet invented in 2007.
I don’t use vscode so I can’t help too much beyond saying Distrobox is awesome and I’ve been using it for my headless dev machine for a few months and won’t go back to anything else.
Agreed. I would have like Ubuntu to come with flatpak, but snap exists for longer than flatpak and has additional use cases. Snap allows to do app packaging and even the rest of the system. Fedora uses rpm-ostree + flatpak instead.
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