This topic was closed just a few hours after @curiouscat asked me to run a defrag on the drive. Unfortunately, as I live in a timezone GMT+10 (Sydney, Australia) I didn’t see the post before the topic was closed. So, I’m starting this one.
Anyway I ran the defrag, or tried to. I found locale-archivefolders in the Aurora partition, three of them, all with guids in the middle of the name. When I tried the defrag I got a message suggesting I use the -r (recursive) option as well, so I did. The command completed almost instantly though, so I’m not sure it actually did anything. When I restarted Aurora it took three minutes to start, and Vivaldi took 90 seconds.
So plan B is to install aurora on my ssd (500Mb) with 112MB allocated to it, and put my /home partition (with ~450Mb) on my internal disk (1Tb). Then use Aurora primarily and see if it starts to slow down over the next few weeks or months. Unless anybody has a better idea.
My only concern here is using Anaconda. I’ve done battle with this installer before (trying to install Fedora a couple of years ago), and comprehensively failed, eventually retiring with my tail between my legs. I eventually installed Fedora, by allowing it to set everything up the way it wanted and just going with that. So everything was in one partition (I prefer to have my home directory on a different partition) but it seemed the only way I could get Fedora installed. Did the same thing with Aurora, but without all the trauma of trying to get the installer to do what I wanted it to do rather than what it wanted to do. Ananconda is, in my humble opinion, the least friendly, the most complex and difficult to understand, the most difficult to use and the least flexible installer I’ve ever used. It doesn’t have to be that way. Nobara has a very simple installer that’s a pleasure to use.
But I digress. I tried installing Aurora using the Blivet option, which seemed to allow me to specify where I wanted everything to go. However the install failed with an odd message that I failed to note but it was about a critical file missing, which is all I can remember about it. So I’m now downloading the iso again, maybe my version is old or corrupt or something, and trying again.
Well, no joy so far. Attempted to install Aurora using the Blivet option, which seems to allow the selection of partitions, but they have to be empty space as per Fedora requirements it seems. Why it has to create its own partitions is way beyond my understanding of the technicalities. However the install failed with this error:
That was trying to install Aurora with the root on my ssd and home on the internal hard drive. I tried it again, installing the whole os on the ssd in one partition, again using Blivet, and got the exact same error. My next attempt will be, as I’ve learned before, to create some free space on my ssd, and let Anaconda do its own thing. In my experience, it’s the only thing that actually works with Anaconda. (It’s certainly go the right name. It squeezes you tighter until you surrender and do exactly as you’re told…)
I have my home folder on a separate drive. My strategy was just to let the installer have the whole root drive, then assign my home drive and partition in /etc/fstab.
I also went off menu and setup a swap partition on another NVMe, while I was setting up SLOG and L2ARC for zfs on other partitions on that drive.
Okay, I give up. I’ve tried to install Aurora on my ssd, and the only way it will let me do it is to do it in automatic mode (I’m assuming, I haven’t actually done it). That worked last time, but nothing else works. Let me rephrase that. I can’t get anything else to work.
To be honest I’m a bit nervous about letting Anaconda loose in automatic mode on my ssd, which contains the root directories of three other distros, one of which is my daily driver. I’ve had the experience of accidentally clobbering a whole drive while trying to install a new distro before, and it took me quite a while to reinstall everything. I also lost heaps of data as I had never bothered with backups. I do now though. And I make sure before I press the “install” button to check that what the installer is about to do is what I want to actually want it to do.
Well, found a way to get Anaconda / Blivet to install Aurora in another post on another forum. I now have Aurora installed with the root partition on my ssd and /boot, /var and /var/home (which I didn’t know I needed) on a USB drive. Performance seems pretty good so far, but it’s early days.
Found the instructions again. I’d carefully cut and pasted them into a file, then carefully forgot I’d done it. I blame Alzheimer’s…
choosing /dev/sda1 for /boot/efi
then /dev/sda2 for /boot and here it is important to say formatting as ext4
now unlocking the btrfs volume
with the + button add a new subvolume root with mount point /
then add a new subvol var with mount point /var
finally add a new subvol home with mount point /var/home
He did it with btrfs, but I thought, discretion being the better part of valour, I’d stick with ext4. I created the partitions I wanted first, than started the installer and chose manual partitioning with Blivet. I was able to allocate the partitions as detailed in the instructions above, and the install was successful. Wasn’t sure how to big to make /var, a quick search seemed to indicate that it doesn’t need much. I made it one gig. Root is 112Gb, /var/home a tad under 500Gb.
Well, a month later and with occasional use Aurora still seems to be performing adequately, running off the ssd. It still takes Vivaldi 90 seconds to start. Thunderbird only takes 30 seconds. tbh lately I’ve been using CachyOS mostly, which is like getting into a Ferrari after driving around in a VW Beetle. Vivaldi starts in about 5 seconds.
By comparison, my original install of Aurora on the usb drive still takes a frustrating four minutes (almost) to get to the login screen, and another 2 minutes to get to a working system. Vivaldi still takes about ninety seconds to load. This was after the latest round of updates. I’m gonna trash that install.
I guess @inffy is right. Running Aurora (or any other rpm-ostree based system) on a usb drive is just not viable.
