ethd

joined 1 year ago
[–] ethd@beehaw.org 6 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It'll be compatible with 5 Gbps devices, but if you're intentionally looking to restrict even 10 Gbps devices down to 5 Gbps for some reason, you might be able to find something in your BIOS that lets you do that, or you can get a USB 3.0 extension cable that'll limit your speeds to 5 Gbps.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

I would argue that NixOS absolutely is the OS you get if your time is worthless, but not every distro is the same. I'd argue that if you need something that doesn't have so many issues a stabler or easier to use distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, and even Fedora or openSUSE) is going to be a better option than trying to bend specifically NixOS to do what you want.

I personally use a mix of Pop, Debian, and Fedora, not because they're particularly powerful, but because they tend to be more straightforward for what I want to do than NixOS, Gentoo, or Arch. I don't mind tinkering, but for my main machines I don't want to tinker much.

Edit: I should clarify that there are plenty of reasonable uses of Windows and I don't fault anyone for using it especially if their familiarity is keeping them from understanding Linux as well as they want to. But I also would make the case that there are a lot of distros out there.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 25 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I think their joke was that Thinkpad Arch users (at least online) have a strong correlation with trans women

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago

Ares as a project has a goal of accuracy at any cost, so tends to need a lot more resources than most other emulators. Before the tragic loss of Near, they wrote an absolutely exceptional article about the development of bsnes/higan and how much power it required for cycle-accuracy of SNES hardware, and it's way more than you would think is feasibly necessary given that emulators like ZSNES (or Gens, as was my Sega emulator of choice at the time) ran under a crappy Celeron in the 90s.

I will say your CPU will likely throttle back well before it'll shut down due to overheating. It might affect emulation performance some, but your PC shouldn't shut down or anything.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This is my real problem with this (and also broadly pointing the finger to the "Unix philosophy" whenever a project like systemd or Wayland exists, ignoring that the large, complex, multifaceted, and monolithic Linux kernel itself flies in the face of that philosophy). Linux may have originally been built to be Unix-like but has become its own thing that shares a few similarities with Unix.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago

I forgot about Corel Linux and Lindows as well now that I think on it.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

…Except Debian wasn't even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu's release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I'm aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.

Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don't exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn't used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 14 points 9 months ago

Oh hey, I was thinking about DSL recently and was bummed that it'd been discontinued for so long. It was my first Linux distro, downloaded over the course of I think a day and a half over rural dial-up. I moved to Ubuntu once I was able to get blazing fast 1.5 Mbps "broadband" but DSL still holds a special place in my heart. Going antiX-based was probably a good move to make it a bit more manageable, and while I downloaded it originally because it was 50MB I agree that it's probably more realistic that people will download it with a connection much faster than dial-up, and the hard cap on a CD-sized image is I think a good compromise. It's still, as the name says, damn small, at least by modern OS standards.

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

I've run Ubuntu Server frequently on VMs for work, but I could kinda go either way on it. The majority of people who have issues with Ubuntu have philosophical differences. I'm inclined to agree for my personal stuff (in principle I'd rather not get my packages from a single source that works on their own whims, in practice I never use anything but Flathub unless I need a package with deeper permissions) primarily because I believe that Linux should be as open as possible. That said, I already mentioned that my principles there only apply to machines I own, so I guess I'm a bit of a hypocrite 😅

[–] ethd@beehaw.org 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't have much to say on this, other than that I appreciate how well-written this deep dive is and I appreciate you for writing it. People get so polarized with these viral math problems and it baffles me.