On 22/06/2019 20.26, Michael Pujos wrote:
On 22/06/2019 20:02, Ignacio Taranto wrote:
If you have a laptop with a small disk, let's say 128 or 256 GB, space *will* matter. Having a bunch of things you don't use/need is inefficient.
If you are so low on storage to care about that, you will probably not use btrfs and snapshots, so we can remove that from the discussion.
But the tools are installed by default. I had them removed and an update today put them back. I have not yet studied why.
They are recommended from another package that is installed. Zypper will pull back recommended packages on updates. If you do not want them you can lock them "zypper al <package>".
And yast/zypper starts them on every update. There is a report about zypper dup stalling for minutes, some snapshot or btrfs operation (I forgot which), despite there not being any btrfs partition (there is a bugzilla).
...
Does having a lot of packages you do not use slow down the system ? I don't think so as it is not going to affect startup times significantly. Though it can be painful if you have a slow internet connection.
It slows updates; not only the download, but also the calculation of them. The default uses delta rpms, with a longish CPU time.
That being said, it would still be good to have a mode of operation of the distro that can keep things fairly minimal without the fear of breaking stuff.
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Benjamin Zeller