kumi
Turning off swap could make things much worse though
How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it's only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)
Anecdotally, this maneuver can help tremendously tonrecover responsiveness in some cases. I guess the overall sitiation could be improved by tweaking vm.swappiness.
Hence:
After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again
If it's like the last htop image should be no problem.
Apart from what others said about power/throttling, I wonder if the filled up memory during the upgrade (or other memory-heavy use) pushes some central pages to swap and then they stay there after?
After the upgrade and you have plenty of free memory again you can force back everything to RAM by temporarily disabling swap:
swapoff $swapdev && swapon $swapdev
To list swap devices, just run swapon.
Also switching to an X11 window manager can be quite a lot snappier than modern GNOME for older hardware. You could try Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, or KDE with the X session.
If it's not throttling/thernals, I wouldn't be surprised if those two together is what made things worse after migrating dist.
If you've been swapping heavily over time you might also want to check disk health with smartctl and check that you don't have related errors in dmesg.
If you press tab in htop you can also see if there is high IO load going on.
Just to rule it out (wouldn't be the case on default debian):
Is SELinux enabled? sudo getenforce (if command missing or false, it's not your problem here)
You are not running with podman as compose backend? sudo systemctl status podman shouldn't show an active service unless you use it.
It was certainly not intended as a character assessment and it's unfortunate you took it that way. I'm talking about how the release notes (and in passing your post) were written and not about you as a person or maintainer, or even the project itself.
I do hold release notes of a public project with thousands of users to a different standard than anon lemmy.world comments in a feedback thread. Is that interesting or surprising?
I believe there was actionable feedback given. You are of course free to dismiss it.
For a system actually using ~16GB I don't think a 120GB drive is "way too small" for the root but just on the generous side of just about right assuming there's nothing more than boot and swap on it otherwise.
Moving /home to a separate drive while keeping the root intact has a few upsides compared to moving everything to one bigger drive.
Maybe I don’t understand the use case for bentopdf, and considering how popular it is, that is likely true
Especially in this day and age, be careful with believing something is right (or even popular) just becuse it looks popular. Talking about generalities of gameable metrics and the cognitive pattern, not to dunk on the project apart from their communications doing the same mistake.
It's not as much the general style as the particular contents of this release. Your previous release notes did not give the bad impression this one does. Since you did ask for any feedback I let you know why I am now less likely to use or recommend the tool compared to before. The amount of text and emojis spent begging for TrustPilot reviews also contributes.
FWIW, netstat is considered legacy and deprecated. The in-vogue way to do the same thing is ss -lpn | grep 8080.
netstat like ifconfig still works and is shipped in the net-tools package if you like it but if you're learning it's better to build a habit with ss and ip right away.
https://arturogl.com/2023/10/18/linux-new-tools-replacing-netstat/
It's not as black and white as they say. Flatpak is not a bad choice per se but not without tradeoffs and they can come with catches like this because of the security model. There is no one-size-fits-everyone here. If you want all your apps to have access to everything your user does and value convenience over the sandboxing, flatpaks might not be the best choice for your situation. Also like for any repo with external third-party uploads, quality varies a lot between apps and maintainers on flathub. Some are excellent and some are in a sorry state. Before installing from fllathub its a good idea to some basic due diligence on the package and maintainer before jumping in.
I agree with the IanTwenty that the UX has room for improvement in making it more obvious what's going on and making it easier to manage customizations and overrides. For the time being, getting comfortable with Flatseal and learning more about Flatpaks seems like the best way for a user to make it work for them if defaults don't work out.
Flatpak has tradeoffs and whatever is on flathub is not guaranteed to always be your best pick. That doesn't make it Bad. Going as far as calling them harmful in general is hyperbole. It can still be a great option for many users.