I would not worry about virtual memory usage. Virtual memory can include memory mapped files and does not indicate actual ram usage - only the address space that the program has opened at some point. There is little point in worrying about it.

IMO the best thing is to just start using it. You will start to pick things up fairly quickly then. Puzzles don’t often ingrain different ways todo things and often focus on weird or niche things that don’t come up as often. They can be a nice supplement to not a substitute for just using it in real world usescases.

I do also find it helpful to read the shortcut keys on their site to get a feel for what is available. You won’t remember everything but it can be useful to know what is possible. Then when you hit a problem you may remember reading about something that can help and go look it up again.

If it is working then there is no need for a reinstall. If you cannot live without it for a day then you might want to not mess with it.

At the same time this is Arch so you can create a new partition and install from your current system into that. And only switch over when you are happy with it. It can be useful to go through the install process occasionally to ensure you can still set it up if something ever does happen to your system. Or to ensure you are configuring things with the latest recommended settings and packages.

But there is no need to wipe your current system to go through that process.

Just dont format the drive when installing a new distro. BTRFS or not you can delete the system folders manually first if needed but I believe that some if not all distros will delete the system folders for you (at least ubuntu used to do this last I tried). And if not you can do it manually.

It does not matter if you have a separate partition or not for /home installers won’t touch it if it already exists except to create a new user if needed. Remember, all the installers do is optionally format the drives, mount them then install files into those drives. If you skip the formatting and manually do that partitioning (or using an existing partition layout) it will still mount and write to the same places regardless of it they are separate partitions or not. So a separate partition does not add any extra protection to your home files at all.

But regardless of what you do you should ALWAYS backup your home data anyway. Even with separate partitions or subvolumes the installer can touch or delete anything it wants to and you can easily click the wrong button or accidentally wipe thing. At most preserving your home saves you from restoring from a backup it should not be done instead of backup.

There is no problem with having home on a different disk. But why do you want swap on the slower disk? These would benefit from being on the faster disks. Same with all the system binaries.

Personally I would put as much as possible on the faster disk and mount the slower somewhere that the speed matters less. Like for photos/videos in your home dir.

/boot can be anywhere though if you are getting a grub error that suggests the UEFI firmware is finding grubs first stage but grub is having issues after that. Personally I don’t use grub anymore, systemd-boot is far simpler as it does not need to deal with legacy MBR booting.

What you have listed is a good start. https://www.rust-lang.org/learn has additional resources as well once you have gotten through those.

My point is the different levels of just working are subjective, not objective. I personally have spent far more time fixing bugs or just reinstalling ubuntu systems then I have over the same period for Arch systems. So many of my ubuntu installs just ended up breaking after a while where I have had the same Arch install on systems for 5+ years now. Could never get a Ubuntu system to last more then a year.

Everyone has different stories about the different OSs. It is all subjective.

You can cherry-pick examples of problems from every OS. That is my point. They all have issues that you may or may not encounter and quite a few that would make people from other OSs scratch their head and think what the hell the devs are thinking. Pointing out one issue of one OS does not change any of that.

Which is proven by the other replys to your comment - others dont find this issue to be as show stopping as you do and just live with it or dont use it at all. How many issues do you do the same for on your favorite OS?

There is no perfect OS that just works for everyone. They are all software so they all have bugs. People how say an OS just works have never hit those bugs or have gotten used to fixing/working around or flat out ignoring them.

This is true of all OSs, including Windows, Linux and MacOS. They are all differently buggy messes.

Linux is the buggy mess that works best for me though.

How risky is it for Google sanning those mails in terms of privacy?

Afraid to tell you but Google already scans thousands emails if you use proton or not. The company you are sending mail to likely uses gmail internally. Does not matter how private your end is if the other end is wide open.

Though I am not convinced that anyone would care if you use a non gmail account for any technical role. Hell add a custom domain to proton and you can hide the fact you are using proton and create a even more professional looking address.

Realtime is important on fully fledged workstations where timing is very important. Which is the case for a lot of professional audio workloads. Linux is now another option for people in that space.

Not sure Linux can run on microcontrollers. Those tend to not be so powerful and run simple OSs if they have any OS at all. Though this might help the embedded world a bit increasing the number of things you can do with things that have full system on chips (like the Raspberry pi).

I disagree. It is more than just a nitpick. Saying black holes suck things in implies that they are doing something different than any other mass. Which they are not. Would you say a star sucks in stuff around it? Or a planet? Or moon? No. That sounds absurd. It makes it sound like blackholes are doing something different to everything else - which is miss-leading at best. They way things are described matter as it paints a very different picture to the layman.

By clear receiver it means there is only one function a name can point to. For instance you cannot have:

struct Foo;
impl Foo {
    pub fn foo(self) {}
    pub fn foo(&self) {}
}

error[E0592]: duplicate definitions with name `foo`
 --> src/lib.rs:5:5
  |
4 |     pub fn foo(self) {}
  |     ---------------- other definition for `foo`
5 |     pub fn foo(&self) {}
  |     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ duplicate definitions for `foo`

Which means it is easy to see what the function requires when you call it. It will either have self or &self and when it is &self it can auto reference the value for you. This is unlike C and C++ where you can overload a function definition with multiple different signatures and bodies and thus the signature is important to know to know which function to actually call.

Yes rust has a operator for dereferencing as well (the *). This can be used to copy a value out of a reference for simple types the implement Copy at least.

On quite a few terminals, alacritty is one, you can hold SHIFT while dragging to select things on the screen to copy from. This suppresses sending mouse events so works when you have editors, tmux or other things that can interpret mouse clicks. It does mean that it is just copying chars from the terminal so ends up copying everything on the screen. Unlike the copying baked into things like tmux of editors.

And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Incrementally over time by reading the documentation and/or manuals of the commands I need to run and looking up how others solve the problems that I need to get other ideas about things (even, periodically, for things that I already know how to do to see if anyone has found a better way to do it or if a new tool has come out that helps). And trying things out/experimenting with different ways of doing things to find out what works well or not.

Huh? You seem to be arguing both ways? If the system drive is full you have problems well before you risk losing data and if the home drive is full you have problems saving data? Both of these things can happen in a split partition or single partition setup. The split partition just means you have to get the space correct or end up with long resizing options for juggling the size around. And with a single partition it gives you more places to free up space when you do run out.

Need to save a file but the disk is full? Clean out the package manager cache. You cannot do that if the partitions are separate. An update does not have enough space? Delete a steam game or clear out your downloads folder.

Ext also has a reserved space option which when there is less free space than that option it refuses writes to anything but the root user - which is meant to solve the issue of a user trying to use up to much space, there is always a reserved bit that the system can do what it needs to. Though I have never seen this configured correctly for a running system and root can blast past the default 5% on smaller drives with a simple update. Or some other process is running as root is already consuming that space.

Other partition types like btrfs have proper quotas that can be set per directory or user to prevent this type of issue as well and gives you a lot more control over the allocated space without needing to reboot into a live USB to resize the partitions.

People seem to think a split partition helps but I have generally found it just causes more problems then it solves and there are now better tools that actually solve these problems in more elegant ways.

You don’t actually require a separate partition - you just need to not reformat the current one when reinstalling. Most distros I have seen will delete system folders if you don’t format but will always leave the home folder intact. Manually deleting the system folders is also an option if the installer does not.

TBH I am not sure a separate partition actually buys you anything but false confidence (which we do sometimes need ;) ). During the partitioning phase you can easily delete or format the wrong one (hell, if you only have one then it is less error prone to skip it all together). And after that step the drives are mounted and there is nothing protecting your files from the installer deleting them. It is just installers don’t touch the home folder or anything other then the system ones if it is on one partition or 50 different ones - it just sees the files in the directory it wants to install to. The only way a separate partition would add protection is if it were mounted after the install - which I do not know of any installer that actually does that.

As with anything. ALWAYS backup the data you care about before installing a new OS. The separate partition does NOT protect your data from deletion in any way. Leaving your home folder is simply a convenience option so you don’t need to restore all your files after the installation - not a replacement for a backup.

helps with issues like running out of diskspace

Or causes that problem if you don’t manage to predict your usage patterns correctly. I have seen many people run out of space on one or the other but have plenty overall and would not have had a problem with a single partition.

It is quicker to list everything that has not been linked to causing cancer:

There, I think I got everything.

For reproductive outcomes (sperm quality) and digestive outcomes (immunosuppresion) we rated overall body evidence as “high” quality and concluded microplastic exposure is “suspected” to adversely impact them.

For reproductive outcomes (female follicles and reproductive hormones), digestive outcomes (gross or microanatomic colon/small intestine effects, alters cell proliferation and cell death, and chronic inflammation), and respiratory outcomes (pulmonary function, lung injury, chronic inflammation, and oxidative stress) we rated the overall body of evidence as “moderate” quality and concluded microplastic exposure is “suspected” to adversely impact them.

We concluded that exposure to microplastics is “unclassifiable” for birth outcomes and gestational age in humans on the basis of the “low” and “very low” quality of the evidence. We concluded that microplastics are “suspected” to harm human reproductive, digestive, and respiratory health, with a suggested link to colon and lung cancer.

Future research on microplastics should investigate additional health outcomes impacted by microplastic exposure and identify strategies to reduce exposure.

None of that is very definitive or quantitative at all - even the high quality data only gives a suspected adverse impact. Overall not really very actionable. It is probably not very good for us and something we should be working to reduce. If for no other reason than all the other problems we know excessive plastic production is causing.

Linux From Scratch (aka LFS) is a set of documentation and resources that describe one way in which to build everything on a Linux system yourself. It is not the only way though. Embedded systems is one place you might build every image from scratch but if you go down that route you are typically using something like yocto or buildroot which are designed to compile simple embedded distros for specific projects using an existing system for the build process. These are useful as embedded systems are often resource constraint and you don’t want to include things that are not required and often on different architectures from the host systems (such as ARM CPUs).

These days there is very little commercial purpose to creating your own distro from scratch that are not for embedded systems. It is a lot of work and generally not worth the effort unless building a distro is the point of your business - but even then you better have a good reason that using an existing one as a base is not a good idea. Packaging everything for a general purpose distro is a lot of work with very little benefit for a company to do. It is vastly easier to use what others have done as the base until you can justify the expense of managing everything your self (if it ever makes sense to do that).

So the only real place that you would go down building a distro from scratch is if you have a new or different idea about package management. Arch Linux did this with pacman, Gentoo with emerge, Alpine with apk, and Nixos with nix. These types of things typically start out as hobbyist projects and grow from there rather than with a commercial intent in mind.

The only other thing that makes sense is from a very high threat model for security reasons - thinking nation state level actors not your every day home user. You may want to build everything from scratch if you want to absolutely trust everything on your system and have the time and resources to do this.