Installing Linuxmint to Micro SD card (Any Optimization tricks?)

Linux Mint
1

Dear All,

I wanted to and have installed Linuxmint 20 XFCE to my 128 GB micro SD card successfully.

I would like to know if there are any tips or tricks that I should keep in mind now to make efficient use of system.

Note:

  1. I have 4 GB RAM on my laptop
  2. I have created a swap space on Micro SD card of 8 GB and rest is dedicated to Ext 4 for “/”
  3. MBR installed on Micro SD itself

My system is up and running.

2

Do you want to increase performance or increase efficiency of human interaction with the system?

3

Increase system performance is first.

I am not facing any issue with human interaction yet.

4

So I want to first make clear, that increasing system performance is like cancer. People always hope for a very simple, very inexpensive and very fast treatment, that just makes everything better. However, there is no single, simple and quick solution to such a problem. You have to make sacrifices to master either.

That means, one can only really increase system performance with these quite rudimentary methods:

  • Use better hardware.
  • Use less storage space. If you have less things available, there are less things cluttering your performance.
  • Use less apps, especially at the same time.
  • Use “lightweight” Apps. E.g. you don’t need to use Atom or even LibreOffice for most text editing, you might as well use Kate (my recommendation) or Geany, which are by a huge pile quicker to use.
  • Especially for Linux: use “lightweight” desktop environments. Use LXQT, LXDE or XFCE or anything based on that. Do NOT use Gnome, Unity, etc.
  • Especially for Linux: use “lightweight” window managers.
  • Especially for Linux: don’t use a GUI, if you don’t really have to. E.g. I see no purpose in having a GUI for hashing files. I just use rhash on the command line, which is plenty of good enough. (There are also pseudo "GUI"s for the command line, which seem to the human like it’s a graphical interface.)

So for your situation I would definitely recommend to pretty much take a look and perhaps apply all these recommendations, except perhaps the first one, as we already agreed on your specific laptop, having 4GB RAM. :wink:

5

Dear @Akito

That was overwhelming.

As I stated earlier, I have already installed Linuxmint 20 XFCE so Hardware (including memory) and Desktop environment is out of scope now.

Also, GUI is my basic need.

My concern is to tweak the system so that running from a micro SD card is smooth.

In Short, I am asking that since I have installed the system on external device i.e. Micro SD card (instead of regular install on internal Hard Disk) hence is there any tweaks to increase Read Write performance like (but not limited to) cache, Swap etc.