userrepository-eu

It took me a while to update you about the latest changes to my Arch and Arch-compatible Linux distributions repository. But first, let me apologize for the delay: work, personal life and, for about 3 weeks now, a horrible back pain (that just doesn’t stop, even with an handful of medication) have kept me from doing this in the time frame I expected. First on the “agenda”, I experimented with increasing the zstd compression level for the packages like I said I would do in my last post about the repository....

Since the last post about my Arch (and Arch-compatible distributions) binary repository, I’ve added a few more packages. Some examples are the Mullvad VPN desktop client and nimdow, a window manager written in the Nim programming language. Or Emptty, an amazing display manager that I encourage you to try. Despite adding more packages, the compilation and compression time only had a small increase and I’m still below the 5 hour mark....

In the previous post, I wrote about how I changed the virtual machine provider from Scaleway to Hetzner. In the days following the transition, I timed how much it took to build all the packages and sync them to the webserver, so I could compare the new provider with the previous one. The specs are very similar: 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. There is one difference, however: with Scaleway, the vCPUs were some Intel low-end ones (although they’ve upgraded to AMD EPYC very recently) and with Hetzer they are AMD EPYC....

After a small forced hiatus, userrepository.eu is back. The Covid-19 pandemic made a hit in my income and the wife’s income, so I had to temporarily suspend non-priority expenses. During this period, I had time to consider a few things about the future of the project and decided to change the provider from Scaleway to Hetzner, mostly because the Arch image they’re using is essentially abandonware. If you’re reading this, you’ll probably know that Arch Linux changed the default package compression to ZSTD....