Yes they have a live option.
I have tried garuda-dr460nized-linux-tkg-bmq-210107
and a second one.
They both have a dark color.
Even their website has a black back ground
I personally do not like black desktop.
It took me a while to make the change to a more comfortable back ground.
I have also tried to install ii on a 700 Gb disk
and got a message about partioning the disk.
@R_G I really don’t understand why people are so keen on live versions. I use them for rescuing operations or at off-site business meetings. In neither case, Garuda would be my option.
In order to get a real feeling, I reckon, you need a full installation and really use it, not live, not virtual machine.
As I said before, I’m not trying to sell this one, but they definitely have many desktops and themes with very different looks. When it comes to dark or bright, I have phases: I have light and bright ones and sometimes, like right now, I’m in a darker mood.
Anyway, despite the eye-catching optics of this distribution, I consider the most important features to be the ones under the hood: The selection of pre-installed tools, the file system, the kernel tweaks, the automatic snapshots etc.
The latter might be the reason why it wanted to reformat the disk. This distribution uses BTRFS and not EXT4 as file system, for a variety of reasons.
Yes, I saw that GARUDA uses BTRFS and not EXT4.
I’ll format the drive first.
I hope @C.J gets it installed.
On https://www.muo.com/tag/ext4-btrfs-making-switch-linux/
I read that :
Ext4’s limits remain pretty impressive. The largest volume/partition you can make with ext4 is 1 exbibyte—the equivalent of roughly 1,152,921.5 terabytes. The maximum file size is 16 tebibytes—or roughly 17.6 terabytes, which is much bigger than any hard drive a regular consumer can currently buy.
I’ll never need such a file or such a disk.
So, unless I find a simple way to return to ext4 or FAT, I don’t think I’ll try to force/convince myself and format the disk to go with Garuda.
You might as well create a separate partition and format it as BTRFS, if this file-system is mandatory.
Thank you very much for this explanation. It´s great to have a solution to our investigation.
Regarding the BTRFS question:
@Akito’s option is one. However, if you don’t like Garuda, the other one is to simply reformat the disk in the format you like. Gparted makes that very easy. Still, most Linux distributions now support btrfs out of the box.
There’s a number of reasons why the distro’s developers chose this filesystem over the well-established and mature ext4:
It’s important to also note that we are always talking about root partitions here. If we were talking about general storage partitions, without Linux root on it, the story would be entirely different.
The huge plus about BTRFS is, that it has industrial style reliability features for consumer Linux users. However, if you want such features for generic data disks, ZFS would be a much better choice. The problem with that is, that its history with Linux is much younger than with BSD. One of the symptoms of that fact is that disks formatted in any ZFS style are by far not supported by every Linux version natively. Sometimes you can have trouble and you certainly are in for a very manual setup, if you really decide to have a ZFS based root disk. Sometimes, it may not work, at all.
Basically, btrfs is the middle ground between ext4, a generic consumer Linux format, and zfs, an industrial level format with tons of features for data disks and huge amounts of stored data.
I thank you both @Mina and @Akito.
Thank you very much for this explanation.
I’ll consider this when I decide to spend time on Garuda.
I am reviving this old thread, somewhat, but no sense in starting a new one for BTRFS.
Since my start with Linux, I have always used ext4. But since I decided to use Fedora for my home server (and finding it a bit of learning curve after years of Ubuntu-based distros), I got ready to set up Timeshift and saw that I could only use BTRFS.
Reading the various threads on the file systems here on ITSFOSS, I see that Timeshift is not the only app using it.
Four Linux machines will backup to the server with rsync, their Timeshift backups will also reside there. I installed a 2 TB M.2 NvME disk just for backups (keeping the OS & server apps on the smaller SSD). I had formatted it as ext4 before I knew all this about other fs.
So since timeshift has to have BTRFS on Fedora, should I reformat the entire drive to BTRFS? And all my rsync backups can reside on this same drive? Or do I need to make part of it BTRfFS and part ext4.
Thanks,
Sheila
Oh, and I forgot to add that clonezilla images need to also reside on the backup drive in server. Plus, whatever the server format is, it has to backup to ext HDDs.
Thanks,
Sheila
That is unusual.
What does it mean?
I saw an article that said if your linux filesystem is ext4 you have to choose sync in TS, while if your linux filesystem is btrfs you have to choose btrfs in TS.
That makes the choice rather redundant.
This was in the article I found for setting up Timeshift in Fedora:
Fedora indeed uses the BTRFS system but Timeshift was created with Ubuntu-based systems in mind and the default sub-volume name layout in those systems starts with “@” i.e. “@” for the root sub-volume and “@home” for the home sub-volume.
Fedora uses BTRFS but doesn’t use this naming scheme for its sub-volumes “by default”, you have to manually configure the sub-volumes to match the layout compatible with timeshift.
I did not even know that Fedora used the btrfs fs until I read that and opened gparted on the server and saw:
So yes, I have always chosen rsync in TS. But since the / drive is btrfs, I guess that’s why you have to choose that option in setup on Fedora. But maybe since I am using a different drive from the OS for the snapshots, it would work with rsync. Opening TS for initial setup defaults to BTRFS. So I did not proceed with setup and instead searched for how to use it on Fedora.
Thanks,
Sheila
I dont like distros that implement important things behind your back.
Agreed. I thought, “How could I have missed such an important item at time of install?”
At this point, I am considering ditching Fedora on the server. While I am always glad to learn more about Linux systems (and I am loving it on my old Surface Pro 7), it seems the Wayland issue is making the issue of rdp far too complicated and something that I have used for years (Timeshift) needing something different than rsync.
I will look at my options.
Thanks,
Sheila
Here is the excerpt from Fedora on the btrfs used in Workstation:
Fedora Workstation uses a different default disk configuration from other Fedora Editions and Spins.
Btrfs has two key advantages for users using the default filesystem configuration:
Transparent compression means that data stored on disk uses less space
System reinstallation while preserving user data can be supported, while avoiding the issue of volumes running out of space. This is due to the fact that Btrfs subvolumes are not limited to a static predefined size.
Btrfs also provides a range of other features, such as snapshotting and online shrinking, which can be useful for those who want to use them...
While it makes my head spin learning all this subvolume info–after watching a few videos of making snapshots in terminal–I found I can still use Grsync (as @Rosika pointed out in a separate discussion) for backups on the server. That would keep everything uniform across my Ubuntu-based machines and the Fedora on one tablet as well as the server.
I have seen discussion on the speed of BTRFS as well, so that is a plus. However, I am also backing up the “backups” to an ext HDD that is not a BTRFS format, currently. And as the ext HDD will be slower than the internal drive, if BTRFS makes that process faster, save space, etc., I would need to format the partition on there as well.
Any insight into doing this most efficiently would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Sheila
Sorry I have no BTRFS experience. it seems overly complicated for my usage, so I avoid it. Same goes for ZFS. and LVM.
Do you need to backup the TS backups? Perhaps that is an unwanted side effect of BTRFS.
I think your first issue to conquer is the Wayland ↔ Remmina question. A functioning Remmina seems to be basic to what you need. If you sort that first, the filesystem decisions may become obvious.
Well I was only wanting to know if it is “better” due to speed & space saved. But I have plenty of space, and since I selected TS “rsync” it did not disagree since the volumes are stored off the OS drive.
No machine works for home network, it’s free, and if I ever have time to deal with Remmina, I will. But having spent 2 days on this, I will take what I can get.
Thanks,
Sheila
I am going to put this here for future reference: I am not using the BTRFS for Timeshift on Fedora. Apparently TS requires a certain file structure in order to use it and even after attempting to follow instructions to get that file system in place and recognized by TS, it kept reporting it was not the right subvolumes, etc.
Needless to say, at least for TS, this is not worth the hassle. So I just set it to use rsync and store it on the other internal drive on the server. It made the first backup of my Fedora 39 server OS (along with dot files) in record time without issue.
For the other backup methods, using Grsync is simple to use and I am getting it setup on each machine.
Sheila Flanagan