• 7 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle








  • Without knowing your system utilization numbers it’s impossible to give good recommendations.

    I recently upgraded my system from a 4th gen i5 with 8 GB ram (Main board maxed) to a 6th gen i5 with 64 GB of ram (Again max out the main board).

    Before the upgrade I was sitting at 95% ram usage + 3 GB swap usage with the proc averaging 0.56 load, io wait was averaging 30%. In other words, I was clearly RAM bound.

    After the full body transplant, I was using 23 GB ram with a 1.52 load average and 0 swap. Io wait at 3%.Not enough time for averages yet, but there was night and day difference in application performance.

    Let your system stats dictate what you need to upgrade.






  • Not a new question. When I first got into Linux every one was asking “How can we get everyone to dump Windows and use Linux instead?” I long ago got tired of hearing about THIS year being the year of the Linux Desktop.

    The answer is the same in both cases. Make it default, because most people don’t really care so long whatever is default does what they need it to do. Add in the network effect GitHub has and things would have to get incredibly bad before everyone would switch.

    The reason everyone uses Windows? Because “everyone” uses Windows. Why does everyone use GitHub? Because “everyone” uses GitHub. Both have become the default. That would have to change.


  • Whoops, hit send without meaning to.

    Since then I have been using Linux as a primary OS for most of the systems that I use on a daily basis. When ever I am using something else I constantly find my self missing the flexibility that Linux based OSs offer me.

    And, yes, the hardware situation has gotten considerably better since then, as long as your not running bleeding edge hardware.


  • Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.

    I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.

    And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).

    I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.