On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 12:51:33PM -0400, Daniel wrote: > Dear Lennart, > > I hope that when one opens a "whishlist bug" at least there is a chance to > have a confrontation. > > The main point I want to address is when you do a "smart installation" it is > supposed to perform a clean installation hence the only folder that must to > be untouched is "/home". The same concept when you have "/" and "/home" in > separated partitions and you perform a clean installation. I think that is > pretty trivial, the smart parts are: > > * the installer is able to check for a previous Debian installation before > to begin the process; > > * and in case it founds a previous installation, the installer, is able to > perform a fresh installation without overwriting the "/home" folder.
Well I believe you have the option to not format a mountpoint during the install already, so at least that part should be pretty easy. > I can confirm that ElementaryOS and POP!_OS, that share the same installer, > can do that. Well hopefully someone will try to contribute that then. I suspect the main thing is finding someone that wants to implement it and do the work to add it and maintain it. > Last point I want touch is about the swap partition. With the SSD and the OS > able to boot in a bunch of seconds the hibernation doesn't make any sense > today. For example I have 16GB of ram, based on the standard rules I should > use at least 1.5x of the ram if not the double. It means that I should use > 32GB just to hibernate my session, no way... With the SSD disks the lesser > you write on the disk the better, I put just 2GB of swap-file and > "swappiness" at 1 and the swap is never used and I didn't waste 30GB of > space. Only advantage to huibernation is not having to close all the things you are working on and opening them again after the next boot. I do find hibernation takes too long with a lot of ram and hence never do it myself. :) > To conclude I think I elaborated everything clearly, I see a lot of benefits > and improvement with the suggestions I gave to Debian, I also think that are > pretty trivial to implement. I don't want introduce a Windows behavior of > "reinstall when it broken", but back to time when I hadn't a fast internet > connection it was faster download the full ISO and performing a fresh > installation rather than doing a "dist-upgrade". I remember upgrades over dial up. Still did not make me want to go download full iso images elsewhere. It could do it while I slept. Things have gotten a lot bigger since then though. I have seen people keep a subset mirror of Debian on a USB drive that they would update with rsync once in a while at work, and bring home to use for upgrades where the connection was slow. Still in place upgrades of course, not using the installer. > The bottom line is with a smart installer you don't need to separate your > disk(s) in partitions but you can throw everything in "/" including the > "swap" as swap-file that you can modify freely based on your needs (if you > can't live without hibernation[1]). There is also a dynamic swap manager > available on Debian as well: https://github.com/Tookmund/Swapspace -- Len Sorensen
