One is a Pinebook Pro, which is an RK3399 processor. Another is a Surface Go 2 with an Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4425Y.

The actual issue is that the video conferencing works, but trying to do anything else is just suuuper slow. Well, the Surface Go 2 is actually fairly good as long as I’m not touching the ZRAM. But, trying to share a window in Google Meet will always involve a lot of waiting. Firefox and Chromium seem equivalent on the Surface, but the Pinebook seems better in Chromium lately.

I can bare-bones most apps I use on these laptops, but for video conferencing it seems like I have to drag along a whole browser.

I’m surprised how many people turn their computers off. My desktop uptime is 4 day, but, I do put it to sleep at night (which I think counts towards its uptime).

I will look into hibernating. The reason I don’t shut down is because I usually end up with carefully placed windows and lots of ongoing projects all over. Restarting would mean I’d have to start all that up again - assuming I remember what I was doing.

For whatever it’s worth - I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 4GB ZRAM device, and it can’t use all the ZRAM before everything grinds to a halt. I think the way ZRAM works best is if it can “swap out” (compress) anonymous pages that aren’t actually needed again right away, freeing up the fast memory for disk caching and other memory needs.

In my case, I think I can reach a point where the amount of memory Linux needs simultaneously active goes beyond the 4GB of RAM, so it’s just compressing/uncompressing forever and getting nowhere.

So, I think I’d argue that maybe you can’t go too big? I think only anonymous pages can get compressed, and there’s probably only so many gigabytes of those in memory at any given time.

YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.

I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn’t worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.

I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking “Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates.” And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?

So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.

Does Lemmy life feel any different using your private instance now?

I don’t see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I’m doing next. When I’m functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

Actually… to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I’d prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a “Find” dialog and type something reasonable in.

Here’s a little script I’ve put in my $PATH, called memsum:

#!/usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/ps -eo rss,command --sort -rss | egrep $1 | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'

Now you can go: memsum firefox or memsum whatever and see that, actually, apps use a ridiculous amount of memory these days.

I can get Firefox up to 8GB by using things like Office 365.

Sublime?! What packages are you running with that?

Oooh, don’t do the Pinebook Pro. I think anything Pine64 isn’t unsuitable for a non-tinkerer to be using. Also, if there’s DRM content involved (unsure on Hulu), you’ll probably want to stick with an x86 CPU.

Agreed on the latency issues. I tested SMB and NFS once and found them to be pretty much the same in that regard.

I’m interested to test iSCSI, as for some reason I think it might be better designed for latency.

I’ve found that Dolphin, at least, is much slower with network mounts than a CLI-based “mount”.

Are you leaving behind the dotfiles because you don’t want to bring over any of your old configuration?

For whatever it’s worth, you can remove Snap support from your Ubuntu system. If you want more current software, AppImage and Flatpaks are good for that.

I’m not going to be much help ATM, but I believe there is some Google service that allows you to use “foreign” email addresses to log in to a Google account. What that would mean is that you could move your domains away from Google but then keep the Google accounts based on those domains active.

Anyway, fingers crossed I remember about this and actually find the thing I’m taking about and get back to you later today.

I have email going all the way back to 2013 or so, and don’t like the idea of all that information sitting readily available for hacks, warrants, or automated scanning. I move mail older than two years into a local Thunderbird folder to limit what’s sitting online, while also letting me search for recent emails while out and about.

Aside from that, I like that I can still access emails while offline, see all my inboxes, contacts, and calendar in one place. Also, I’ve got enough “apps” that run in the browser.

Actually, sudden account closure without recourse (which Google does) is another reason to make sure I have local copies of email too.

2nd’ing Vorta+Borg. It’s also really easy to find off-site backup options compatible with Borg. I’m using BorgBase, which offers ridiculously cheap storage, the choice of EU and US destination, and supports the development of both Vorta and Borg.

I installed the Fakespot extension and then went looking through my past purchases. It seemed to work really well and called out things as shady for products that I can say, first hand, were actually kind of sketchy.

“If it’s free then you’re the product” isn’t even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.

This is exactly what “you’re the product” means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they’re selling.

They say no one is using these older LTS kernels, but I’m running into them all the time on Android devices. I don’t know if the vendors are taking advantage of those updates, but they’re definitely choosing the LTS kernels for their BSPs at release time.