I installed pop!_os as my daily driver some months ago (completely got rid of windows) and have thought it pretty good. But something about it seemed off - it would take programs just too long to open, it wasn’t snappy… Once I got into something it seemed to run fine (playing dota or something else was fine after initial quirks).
Well, today, figured it out…
When I did the first install, I was very nervous about deleting all of my existing data on my disks and so tried to manually partition everything so that I could get it right (I think I was also planning to dual-boot).
Fast forward to today, and I’m testing speeds on all the drives to see which one to pitch for a new one I acquired. I see the 3 HDDs, but where is the SSD… Oh god, I installed the boot partition and root and home all onto one of the ~12 year old HDDs and the SSD has been sitting idle.
Anyway, just about done with the new fresh install onto the SSD, hopefully it isn’t too hard to start port over the home directory from that HDD…
If you’re not yet confident in your Linux skills, a good idea would be to disconnect all drives except the one you want to install on, during installation… especially if you have multiple drives of the same size
Even if you are confident in your Linux skills this isn’t a bad idea. I’ve seen too many OS installers put things on drives other than the one you choose to risk it at this point.
Gets a bit annoying when you’ve got a tower with 15 years of old drives from previous builds connected
Yeah, Murphys law. Unplug everything except what you work on if you do file system level stuff, no matter the experience or focus you can put in.
NVM
It’s a great idea and works perfectly in this case. Unfortunately, it’s pretty challenging to disconnect an NVMe drive when it’s blocked by the CPU cooler or other components. In my case, I always recheck multiple times before making any partitions changes.
you should make backups, so you can enjoy being less nervous
What’s the easy way to do this on an arch system?
Probably the easiest way to get a backup is backintime and an external disk. Although if you really care about your data you should use a 3-2-1 strategy.
I use borgbackup with borgmatic.
Backing it up to a local hdd and to a hetzter storage box.
if you still have multi boot, i would suggest using clonezilla to put images of everything onto an external HD.
if you just have linux, the easiest way is to keep an installation medium, get a big USB stick (or external HD) and tar everything on to it. tar has a test mode, a diff mode and incremental mode, so you can make sure it has everything. you can also exclude things like snaps (they appear twice when installed, so no need to backup both). to restore, you would use the installation medium to fix partitions if necessary, then extract everything and maybe chroot into it and fix the boot loader.
When I installed pop! Os (on my ssd) it was laggy and a little glitchy, it’s like the whole os would just freeze up sometimes. It really got on my nerves. I prefer nobara, it’s so snappy and fast, everything just feels better than windows, and it’s way more customizable. But there is definitely a higher learning curve and some small weird glitches you have to deal with so I wouldn’t recommend it to someone without intermediate knowledge
It made a huge difference in windows thats for sure. From the windows splash screen to applications becoming responsive took for fucking ever on a HDD. I’d imagine on linux it’d be much faster on a HDD, but I switched after ssds became the norm.
Linux is much better on hdd, windows upgrading to ssd was absolutely seismic, especially for games.
Linux you notice, but once the applications are running you don’t notice it too much till you REALLY run low on memory, or keep opening new docs or something.
The swappy bois are coming
You don’t need to port the home directory, just have it stay on the other disk, that’s how I used to do my systems when I had small SSDs. But porting it should be straightforward, just copy it over and it should all work.
