Big changes are afoot

I have been swapping between using Quirky and Easy, and one thing has become very obvious: Easy is much faster.

No quantitative measurements, just eyeballing, noticing a significant difference in app startup times and general responsiveness. Compiling times are also remarkably faster.

Fundamentally, the reason is that Quirky is a full installation, and in my case on a magnetic platter mechanical hard drive. Whereas, Easy is a layered filesystem, where, if there is enough RAM, 'q.sfs' (which is all of Easy) gets loaded into RAM at bootup.

So, you pay the price of a slightly slower bootup, but faster running.

One extra point: q.sfs is xz-compressed, however, after download and at first bootup, there is the option to recompress it gzip-compressed. This can make a small but noticeable difference to the responsiveness.

Another point: aufs is configured without support for writing directly to the lower layers. This makes aufs faster.

In all, it is a pleasant experience using Easy. So, the title is hinting something!

Tags: easy, quirky