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The Btrfs filesystem for Linux is believed by some to be the next default filesystem for Linux, replacing the current de-facto standard default filesystem, ext4. It has many advanced features which are not available in the current standard filesystem, such as copy-on-write capability which allows the creation of snapshots, which themselves allow rolling back a filesystem to a previous state. The drawback of the filesystem, however, is that it requires regular -- automatable -- …

The Btrfs filesystem used in combination with Snapper to allow system rollbacks without an external live system was pioneered by openSUSE almost a decade ago. This configuration creates Btrfs snapshots periodically and when package management transactions, such as updates, are performed. When a rollback is required, it can be effectuated very simply by booting into one of the read-only snapshots and issuing a Snapper command such that on next boot the system is in the …

Besides producing a beautiful Linux distribution by customizing the theme of the Plasma desktop, the focus of Garudal Linux is to optimize the distribution for performance. As a supplement to Garudal Linux Review [KDE Dragonized (D460nized),210621], I thought it would be interesting to see if the optimizations that the distribution makes do in fact result in better performance. I decided to use Phoronix Test Suite (discussed on this site in Introduction to Phoronix Test …

The TeX Users Group provides a comprehensive TeX system called TeX Live from which Linux distributions build their own system for inclusion in their package repositories. For some time I have noticed some bugs that have caused minor breakage in a long and complex document I have been preparing each time one of the distributions I use regularly updates their distribution. In one case (openSUSE Tumbleweed) it became unusable. The Linux distribution which had the …

Using a 4K TV as an external monitor is an excellent way to increase productivity when workflows require having many application windows open at once. The Plasma desktop is a very capable and flexible desktop environment for such use cases allowing users many options in configuring the working environment.

Depending on the graphics hardware there may be some complications that must be addressed. And some care must be taken to use the appropriate settings in …

Clear Linux, the Intel developed GNU/Linux distribution optimized for Intel processors and particularly suited for containerized applications, recently has made progress in developing the OS to make it usable as a desktop OS in addition to its capabilities as a cloud, server, and container platform. Unfortunately for desktop GNU/Linux users that mulit-boot, it has not made enough progress such that installation is a trivial task, as it is with other established Linux distributions even for …

The KDE PLasma Desktop Environment's File Indexing and File Searching backend, Baloo, is an extremely fast and useful tool of the Plasma DE. It enables among other features, krunner's extremely fast population of search results. Unfortunately, depending on its configuration, it can cause intermittent unresponsiveness during its initial indexing. Having been introduced to the Phoronix Test Suite, I thought I would use it to measure the impact of baloo on system performance. This …