Performance of ArchLinux vs Raspberry Pi OS 64bit Bullseye about astroarch HOT 2 CLOSED

Mattia, thank you for extensive explination. I've heard a lot of good things about AstroArch and if I judge on what you wrote above, it's definitly the right choice. Tweaking desktop performance would be great, but It's not high priority. I will test AstroArch more in headless mode when I have time to see if I can use it as my main Astro OS.

Great work anyway!

from astroarch.

Hi @sajmons!

Rarely performance alone comes from the OS itself, more often from the software you run.
Plasma is a way more resource angry desktop environment than the others and that alone has an important meaning, nontheless we should note at least 2 things:

• plasma eats resource when the desktop re-render itself (window moving or menu clicking), on standby it practically is an idle program (plasma-shell-11), you can feel it is clunky in those moments
• the contrast and look + feeling in Kstars itself has been reported as an improved experience by people

When I think of those the outcome IMO is that at the end of the day the most important thing is to have our FITS/XISF on the disk.

So why ArchLinux? Arch is what I run daily on my PC, for work and private things, I know the OS very very well, I know how packaging works and I know it is a system I can bend to exactly the system I want cause this is the philosophy behind Arch, you get an empty system and you build up your own OS, isn't it wonderful? 🤗

Another reason I went with Arch is the philosophy, this is a quasi rolling distro (arm is not as rolling as x64 but still quite rolling) and this allows me to be running cutting edge versions of libraries that sometimes on Debian distros do not get updated for years.

For VNC, VNC is a hard topic on Linux that gives headaches, x11vnc which is what runs on AstroArch from my experience and early experiments does not perform well as vnc server but it was the only combination I was able to run; maybe (hopefully) things changed and I should try to use some other soft for VNC (or retrying cache which was working like s*%# last time I tried 😂)
Worth a note, the default settings for VNC are pretty high requirements (running the virtual monitor at full HD).
I am also comfortable in saying that the virtual monitor (HDMI doesn't work) cannot even use hardware acceleration properly and this also may contribute to worse performance. Maybe once I figure out how to scale properly VNC while using HDMI it will be better!

The road is long out there, but I have a lot of ideas I would like to implement like multi DE, maybe some day they will be in place 🐧

Last but not least, this has been a great opportunity to contribute to the Arch community, for example, before I started there were no functional indi drivers for archlinux and no packages that would bring them in, now the community got some cool additions 🤓

from astroarch.