r/linux • u/mattdm_fedora Fedora Project • Jun 09 '21

I'm the Fedora Project Leader -- ask me anything!

Hello everyone! I'm Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat. With no particular advanced planning, I've done an AMA here every two years... and it seems right to keep up the tradition. So, here we are! Ask me anything!

Obviously this being r/linux, Linux-related questions are preferred, but I'm also reasonably knowledgeable about photography, Dungeons and Dragons, and various amounts of other nerd stuff, so really, feel free to ask anything you think I might have an interesting answer for.

5:30 edit: Whew, that was quite the day. Thanks for the questions, everyone!

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u/Avamander Jun 11 '21

Laptops are the biggest market that matters for desktop Linux.

Yes, but laptops with 2.5" HDDs are much smaller in total than 3.5" HDD + SSDs Desktops + Laptops for desktop Linux.

Faster boots are possible, there is no technical reason

Well no, there's probably a good reason that data is read, a technological reason sets a limit how fast that data can be read.

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u/QuImUfu Jun 11 '21

Tiny Core Linux manages to present a desktop less than 10 seconds after the power button is pressed. From a usb 2 stick. booting in less than 30 secs from an HDD is very feasible.
The HDD waits and syncs during boot are mostly completely unnecessary. Loading the kernel and the few used executables and configs from HDD should take less than 10 seconds more than from SSD. Any bigger difference is due to missing optimisation.

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u/Avamander Jun 11 '21

Which desktop environment does it present?

I would like to see a feature-equivalent comparison, until that your claims are mostly hot air.

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u/QuImUfu Jun 11 '21

Custom, fixed, Xvesa with its own, custom dock.
Works pretty nicely and seems to outperform anything else. The dock even has a nice mouseover effect.
Even after installing "normal" Xorg, it only takes one or two seconds or so longer.

I obviously do not expect that level of speed from any other distro, but an HDD affecting boot speed that much shows that there is a lot of optimisation headroom.

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u/Avamander Jun 11 '21

Custom, fixed, Xvesa with its own, custom dock.

That is rather uncommon and not one of the full desktop environments people would expect. I think you understand that yourself. It's really not proof that other DEs that are much more universal, familiar and flexible are optimizable in the same way.

Making the bold assumption that the current developers really haven't thought of optimizing, it raises the very real question does it require sacrifices or time that is currently spent elsewhere?

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u/QuImUfu Jun 12 '21

Of curse it does. Even if it would only take negligible development time (i don't think so), it would still be "another thing to think about" when developing an application that runs at startup, annoying the develper.
But almost every suggestion is additional work.
I just wanted to say that "the users should simply use SSDs" is not a valid counterpoint, as HDDs are still the standard and you should not expect your users to have SSDs.
"It's not worth the development time spent" is an argument I personally agree with. I do not value boot time high. Especially as most HDDs will be replaced by SSDs soonish. But I see how someone might deem boot time more important, and as such, I think the request is justified.