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RE: What Kind of Maintenance Do I Need on Linux?
Thank you for the extensive response! I truly appreciate it!
I installed codecs when I installed Mint, so I have this covered.
I use both Update Manager to install updates manually and also sudo get-apt update & upgrade in the terminal.
I don't have a separate graphics card, but I might check the Drivers Update to know how to use it.
I added the CPU temperature applet. Thanks. Could be useful at least for a while to see how high it goes when encoding videos.
One of the optimizations tips I used today was to set Trim to run daily instead of weekly.
I installed GSmartControl, but it doesn't recognize the model of the drive. General driver instead of a specific one could be the issue?
I used Gimp to some extent on Windows. So I know a little bit about it, without being a graphics expert of any sort.
A couple more tips, if you don't mind :)
Instead of
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get upgrade
you can alternately use just apt, which is shorthand support in the most latest Debian based distros. And, apt has a couple additional features, like detecting and handling dependencies a tad better.
sudo apt updatesudo apt upgrade
However, Update Manager essentially does the same thing. The command line version is fine to use on a desktop environment, but becomes a necessity when managing a "headless" server (no desktop environment installed), like Debian's netinst version when there's a desire to keep memory footprint and security attack surface to a minimum and enhancing performance for server loads.
Graphics Program
Here's another graphics option for ya: Darktable, if you prefer a more Lightroom style of photo management and editing.
More SSD stuff
You can gauge how often to Trim an SSD by estimating about how much of your free space is going to be used. Not Trimming is not a problem, it's just a tad faster when the circuitry doesn't have to zero-out the area on the fly before a write.
For instance, on a 500GB SSD or nvme drive 50% used, and you write 10GB of videos daily during saves, you can approximate that it would take 25 days to write to all the freshly Trimmed space. Considering updates and usage, you may find about once a week is still fine. Too many Trims and you may notice your TBW (Total Bytes Written) drive stat go up faster on a daily schedule vs weekly. You can look up your drive's life in TBWs on the manufacturer's spec sheet. I do a ton of writes, yet still only trim once a week. And again, it just makes writes a tad faster, and not that much if you've also over provisioned.
If you want speed demon status, look into adding "noatime" and "nodiratime" into your /etc/fstab root mount. That will prevent Linux from tagging the file with an access time every read. Be careful, one typo on this and you won't be able to mount your filesystem - but personally, I always do this on every SSD and nvme drive.
System Tweaks
I also always set vm.swappiness to 1, on machines with plenty of RAM. This will notify Linux you only want to swap to storage vs memory, as a last resort. Again, I always set this and cache pressure in my /etc/sysctl.conf file:
vm.swappiness=1vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50
As you may start to realize, I'm a performance nut lol.
Enjoy!
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Also, look at LibreWolf as an alternative to Firefox. It's Firefox with the uBlock Origin extension already added and configured. And, it keeps right up to date with Firefox releases.