If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.

Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.

Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.

Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.

A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.

For me;

• the download is absurdly massive. Although it makes sense that you’d need an Android OS image to run Android, it’s bigger than the copy of Arch I used to run it

• integration with the host OS is poor - be nice if copy-paste worked, and file transfer was easier

• super-sluggish, even on quite powerful computers

• never idle, makes my laptop run hot

Okay, it’s emulating ARM64, and emulators need a lot of CPU, but since Android apps are compiled to “Google’s own version of Java” and are JIT compiled to suit the phone CPU, should be possible just to compile them to AMD64 instead and run native.

If there’s an app that only exists on Android and has no desktop / web equivalent, it’s a workable solution, but it does entail compromises.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

Likewise. Bought a three-month sub so’s that I wouldn’t have to top it up too often, and then they came out with all that shit. Subscription expires in two days - forever. Hello, iVPN.

BTRFs, which has advanced filesystems features like snapshots, data integrity checks, and scrubbing, is a less performant filesystem for databases than filesystems that don’t have these features, like EXT4, F2FS and XFS. No shit, Sherlock. At least compare it to ZFS or something.

If you are storing files that you care about, use a filesystem with integrity checks. If you require high database performance, it’ll probably be happier using a whole partition, if not just a whole pile of disks, and be allowed to get on with it. If you are driving nails into a wall, do not compare the performance of different screwdrivers for the task. And so on.

Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all “email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)” apps are pretty bad. You’d think someone would have implemented something better by now.

Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn’t need to be any better.

Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as “styles”. You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.

Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.

Fine - Word can retain a “compatible layout” mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let’s push things forward.

It does just fine for claiming the free games and then otherwise ignoring the Epic store, which is perfection. Think I’ve installed about one out of fifty or so I have available, but the important thing is that Tim doesn’t receive a penny.

Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.

Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn’t be bothered moving it - load times were good, but “fog doors” appear over doorways and cave entrances while they’re being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.

Some people dual-boot to play games with anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux, so a recent “AAA multiplayer” release might skew the numbers for a bit as people boot Windows instead.

Linux installations are slightly higher in the US than in Europe, and much much higher than in China. The “use of Linux online” has a bit of a sinusoidal pattern every day depending on who’s awake. But a big Chinese release - Fallen Feathers, for example - will suppress the Linux percentage for a while as well.

Steam do publish the number of concurrent users as well, it should be possible to multiply through to get roughly the “absolute numbers” you want. I think they publish the numbers of players online for multiplayer games too, and since those are the games that Linux will be locked out of, it might be possible to point fingers at the specific games causing the problems?

I do miss the two-player mode of Lemmings on the Amiga. Amiga could support a mouse in every port, so you could both use a mouse while battling each other. One player needing to use a joystick on ‘every other platform’ (which for Lemmings, was every other platform in existence at the time) was vastly inferior.

Basically every other computer either only supported one mouse, or all mice moved the same pointer.

Not saying that this is a generally useful feature, and networking has improved to the point where split-screen games are rare, and in an era where most games have console ports then mouse-control multiplayer games are unusual, but you know. Niche usages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin

The three wheels and the fibreglass construction meant that it was light enough to count as a tricycle, so that you could drive one on a motorcycle license rather than a full driving license. Plus they sip quite gently at the petrol by the standards of the 1970s. You still saw a few on the roads when I was growing up in the 80s, but it’s been a long time.

The thought of doing 85 mph in one of them is enough to make me fill my trousers, though. Couldn’t pay me enough.

Problem being, of course, that you can add more certificates, but you can’t revoke the original M$ one. And since it’s vulnerable and you can’t get rid, then these exploits still work and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

I’m all here for the green energy. I think it’s worth investing in “both sides of the coin”, though. Now that I’ve replaced all the energy-wasting bulbs in the house with LEDs, and the house is well-insulated enough that there’s just no need to run a three-bar electric fire to keep warm, then I’m at the point where solar panels would be sufficient for nearly all my energy requirements. That’s partly because solar has got better, but mainly because I’m just using loads less

On that note, the secret to not having power and cooling issues running tens of thousands of super-hot GPUs in the desert, is not to build them. Which as they’re not being built, might be enough ;-) But investing in more effort processing units and more efficient models would do it too. They wouldn’t have their “no one else can afford this” moat if it was all made more affordable, tho.

He’s mentioned in the third paragraph of the link. But yes, it is. In order for it to be “worth” burning a trillion dollars every year on AI, then there has to be a time in the near future, 2030 or so, where AI will be making unimaginable trillions. If the datacentres aren’t being built, then that money can’t possibly be coming in as planned. That makes the massive investment in NVidia’s GPUs look extremely shaky - why buy them if they’ll never be turned on? - and it means Oracle will be completely in the shit.

Ed’s arguments have been, “if any link in the chain fails, the whole thing falls down”. I think he’d been leaning towards “banks being unwilling to keep financing datacentre builds on debt” as the most likely stumbling block, but just being unable to power the damned things for want of infrastructure and skilled engineering, as here, is a problem he talks about frequently too.

He thinks it’s likely it’ll bring down the entire tech industry, since they’re now full of idiotic MBAs with no other big ideas. And frankly, it’s about time.

Can’t comment on the Lemur Pro, but the Pulse has an excellent screen. Was wanting more pixels than a 1080p screen but 4K incurs ridiculous cost and tends to be available on “laptops that don’t fit on your lap”. 2880x1800 @ 120 Hz means your fonts look really crisp and updates are smooth.

When my Tuxedo Pulse arrived, I turned it on once to marvel at the fact that it started up straight into Linux. Then restarted it to install Arch btw and never looked back. Fantastic laptop, tho.

Fill up a jerry can or two with petrol next time you fill up your car, and save the vodka for making martinis.

I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:

• the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
• functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
• directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
• terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago

It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.

I’d like to think that the bag is step 1. Step 2 is to balance an old car tire on top, and set it on fire.