Interesting that they clearly know that doing that would be undesirable to the laptop owner.

I used to say, if you are not a “computer person” at all, just pick Ubuntu. If you are a bit more demanding and don’t mentally freeze up in front of computers, yet still want a fairly normal and hassle-free experience, choose Fedora.

These days, I’m not so sure about Ubuntu anymore. They have been disappointing in the recent past.

Maybe I should give Linux Mint a try one of these days.

I hope you realize how much more expensive USB mass storage devices have become in the last three months.

Add another square at the bottom left of the grid that breaks out of the grid on both directions and contains OpenBSD.

To me, the whole BCacheFS thing feels like ReiserFS all over again. Including the borderline insane, self-proclaimed genius lead developer with an out-of-control ego, the massive over-presentation of how important this filesystem, or even filesystems in general are to Linux as a whole, the complete refusal to work within established structures, both in terms of process and in terms architectural structures in the software or to even have a mature discussion about how these ought to be like, and even the ludicrous claims about how Linux will be hopelessly outcompeted if it doesn’t put his genius front-and-center before anything else.

At least Overstreet has not murdered anybody.

There’s also the whole selective perception about software stability. You cannot claim at one point that your fs is completely ready for production use, everyone saying otherwise is a hater, and marking the thing as experimental in the config is basically slander against your person, and then shortly later demand that Linux merge some particularly complex and hard to review several-thousand lines patch in a minor bugfix release because your users could experience horrible data loss otherwise. Those are two things that cannot be true at the same time.

Note, filesystems really are hugely important to an OS like Linux. Even so, both Reiser and Overstreet managed to overstate that to an outright comical degree.

I will never vote for SPD again. Bunch of rotten traitors.

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Spoken like someone who never accidentally typed something into the wrong terminal or accidentally used the wrong keyboard.

Funny thing about that one, gnuplot is not under GPL and has nothing to do with GNU.

I don’t even know which Linux specific fork you are referring to, it could be either a git fork or fork(2).

Error correction and compression are usually at odds.

Not really. If your data compresses well, you can compress it by easily 60, 70%, then add Reed-Solomon forward error correction blocks at like 20% redundancy, and you’d still be up overall.

Domain registration information can usually be found out somehow, although these days you have to jump through some additional hoops to get it, and those hoops are designed to discourage automated lookups. The privacy gains you get from hosting your own email server, though, are massive and IMHO more than worth it. If you are not hosting your own mail server, then the most you can expect from having your own domain is nicer looking email addresses. Depending on what your hosting provider supports you might also get unlimited aliases, maybe even regex aliases, which can be very helpful when handing out mail addresses to various companies and internet services.

If your main concern is that your email address should not be associated with your real identity, your best bet is to just use a VPN to connect to any large email hoster, like ProtonMail. (Obviously don’t use Proton Mail if Proton is also your VPN.)

Saying RAM can help because you can reencode the video to h.264 or h.265 to make use of hardware decoding is more than a bit of a stretch. You can just reencode it to the normal disk instead. Unless it’s the speed of the local block device that’s the bottleneck here (and there’s no indication that it is, and it would be extremely unlikely), using a ramdisk/tmpfs for any part of that is just pointless.

Modern CPUs (from like the last 20 years) will throttle down a lot before they actually shut down. Unless your cooling is completely inadequate or somehow broken, shutdowns because of high load just dont happen. I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

A problem with cooling could also go some way to explaining your performance problems – but it could also just be that your system just doesn’t have the computing power to do what you want it to. The computing demands from video decoding go up dramatically when you go beyond 1080p. If I recall correctly, the Intel Core CPUs with the “U” at the end were the low-energy models (for longer battery life); of course that comes with compromises on the performance side.

The CPU model suggests that this is a laptop, and a fairly old one at that. I would look for things like blocked air ducts or broken fans if I were you. It’s also possible that the thermal compound between your CPU and the CPU cooler has dried out and needs replacing (although laptops of that power class should be using thermal contact solutions that do not dry out), or that contact has lessened for other reasons. Again, if your computer seriously powers down because of load, it’s borderline broken and in need of maintenance.

As for your other question, no RAM cannot help with that. It can hurt if you have too little of it, but once you have enough, the best it can do is not be a bottleneck.

* Edit: Also, make sure you are not setting down the laptop on anything soft, like a blanket, when using it. It will sink in and have its air intakes blocked if you do that.

This is x86 assembler. (Actually, looking at the register names, it’s probably x86_64. On old school x86, they were named something like al, ah (8 bit), ax (16 bit), or eax (32 bit).) Back in the old days, when you pressed a key on the keyboard, the keyboard controller would generate a hardware interrupt, which, unless masked, would immediately make the CPU jump to a registered interrupt handler, interrupting whatever else it was doing at the point. That interrupt handler would then usually save all registers on the stack, communicate with the keyboard controller to figure out what exactly happened, react to that, restore the old registers again and then jump back to where the CPU was before.

In modern times, USB keyboards are periodically actively polled instead.

Why the fuck is a Microsoft account so important to Windows that running it without one is considered a “loophole”?

There’s that “I never vote because politicians do not care about the issues of people like me anyway” attitude again.

(Hint: They don’t care because your kind won’t vote anyway.)

S-ATA still is the only way to have more than two drives in the system.

IMHO, it was a mistake to make USB block storage use the same line of names also used for local hard disks. Sure, the block device drivers for USB mass storage internally hook into the SCSI subsystem to provide block level access, and that’s why the drives are called sd[something], but why should I as an end user have to care about that? A USB drive is very much not the same thing for me as a SCSI harddisk. A NVMe drive on the other hand, kinda sorta is, at least from a practical purpose point of view, yet NVMe drives get a completely different naming scheme.

That aside, suggest you use lsblk before dd.

The last Windows I installed was Windows 10. I was trying to install onto a SATA SSD, while keeping my pre-existing Linux installation on the M.2 SSD intact. This took me an unreasonably long time and lots of failed attempts, and in the end, the only way I could find to make it work was to first physically remove the M.2, then install Windows, then add the M.2 back again. Which sucked a lot, because M.2s are really not optimized for easy or frequent installation and deinstallation.