My guess is some firmware or modules that just makes it that big and if you want room for snapshots you need to resize (or uninstall some variant if not needed). OS installer might have too small default size for a setup like this.

300MBish for a kernel is totally normal and you have 3 variants installed.

Here, you dropped this: /*

BTW ncdu -x /boot

Partitioning in the Debian installer being half-broken is something nobody talks about but IME still a thing.

What do is step through the installer to the point where you’re at, ctrl+F* to get a shell, set it up manually using fdisk/mdadm/lvm/cryptsetup/mkfs, and then back again to rescan and just assign the mounts and filesystems

I think I still have a half-written guide for just this in drafts somewhere actually. If you get stuck you can DM and maybe I dig something up

Debian has this (well, for sources at least) and I think it’s somewhere between 20-30 DVD images for actually-everything. Maybe not something for the day-to-day but great to keep on hand for preppers and the paranoid (:

Ventoy is risky and a bit sus for such a security-critical software.

Glim is another solution for ISO-multiboot-USB that doesn’t require as much trust.

https://glee.thias.es/GLIM

https://github.com/thias/glim

QuickEmu makes distrohopping in VMs easy.

https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

The concept is attractive.

Since back before “atomic” and “immutable” were fashionable buzzwords, I’ve had a few Alpine installations running something like this. Their installer supports it. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Immutable_root_with_atomic_upgrades

I guess I’m also not alone in having been running OpenWrt with atomic upgrades for many years.

Since then been running a ublue fork (Aurora) for a while now. Forking it and running the builds on my own infra instead of relying on their GitHub works after hacking up the workflow files but it’s quite redudandant and inefficient with IMO one too many intermediate layers (kinoite -> akmods -> main -> aurora/silverblue/bazzite -> iso) downloading the same things multiple times repeatedly despite spending considerable overhead on caching. It’s clear that building outside of their GitHub org is not really actively supported.

Also tried openSUSE microOS (Aeon) a year or two back for a while. I want to like it but find zypper and transactional-update pretty uncomfortable and TBH sometimes still confusing to work with. Installing it on encrypted RAID was daunting IIRC. Rough edges. Enough out-of-date docs on the official site to make Debian wiki look like ArchWiki in comparison.

KDE Linux looks promising but it was still in a very early and undocumented stage last I looked. Great to see the progress.

More recently been looking more at Arkane Linux and been using it for some months now. It’s an immutable with Arch base. Much easier to customize and maintain than the ublue options and a lot less time spent triggering and waiting for builds - while having less stuff pulled from third-party servers in the process and an easy way to fork packages by cloning and submoduling an AUR repo. Lot more straightforward to make work without relying on GitHub. If you’re looking at rolling your own builds and are comfortable with Arch, I highly recommend checking it out. My fav so far.

https://arkanelinux.org/

https://codeberg.org/arkanelinux/arkdep

Given the self-contained nature of Debian - cloning the Debian sources is enough to do a complete offline build of everything - I think it’d be the most interesting base for a sustainable immutable distro unless you go to the opposite end with “distroless” (no comment). Looking forward to one.

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.

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.

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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.

Most, likely 95+% of users will never even realise.

Sure, but even 1% of users are still a lot of installations.

There are no ads in Librewolf, Ublock Origin is installed by default.

Not as simple as that and not 100%. Anyway.

If you go to about:preferences, search for autoplay and go to Autoplay Settings, can you confirm default is Block Audio and Video and no exceptions interfering?

If ensuring that doesn’t help, would you be able to share a URL that triggers this behavior?

If you feel overwhelmed by this, an easy rule of thumb is sticking to distro packages of a trusted dist. Ideally ones with long track record, centralized packaging and tiered rollouts.

Roughly,

• High community trust: Debian, SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu

• Depends on the package but at least everything is transparent with some form of process, contributors vetted, and a centralized namespace: Arch, Alpine, Nixpkgs

• Anything and anyone goes, you are one typo away from malware but hey, at least things get taken down when folks complain: AUR, GitHub, NPM, DockerHub, adding third-party ppa/copr

• IDGAF: curl | sh

Of course.

As Arch becomes mainstream and more of an attractive target for attackers I think we will get more of the same thing happening regularly in NPM: Legitimate popular packages getting compromised because a maintainer got infected or phished.

As well as botting of votes and comments.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/arch_aur_browsers_compromised/

There is crap like this all the time, that wave just happened to make news. Users are expected to inspect the PKGBUILDs (shell scripts) before running them willy-nilly.

You do as you wish but please don’t normalize dangerous behaviour.

Friends don’t tell friends to “Just curl shiny.tool/install | sh” or “Just git clone and docker-compose up”.

The built-in rollback functionality doesn’t hurt either.

More than that I think it’s a prerequisite for doing this.