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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • rodbiren@midwest.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlWhich are your preferred laptops?
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    5 months ago

    I have an old Lenovo W550s Thinkpad with a 2GB Dedicated Nvidia and an i5 5500U. It’s got two batteries and sips power. It’s only 4 cores, but for what I run it does great. I get fairly consistent 60fps on low settings for “boomer shooters” like Selaco. The thing is an absolute beast and hardly flexes. The plastic is cracked and I can just hand it to my kids without a care in the world. Dump a drink on it, drop it, I could care less. I had them help me change out the RAM and SSD because it’s essentially bound for the dumpster and any value I get out of it is the cherry on top.

    That and I can run pretty much and retro gaming console on it to about the Wii/GameCube, which blows my mind. All for probably like $200 of hardware.




  • The Ubuntu version is still probably the best. You won’t have to think about graphics drivers or printers. It all sort of just… Works. They rip the awful out of Ubuntu and keep the excellent, world class, support in place. You’d be hard pressed for find a better commercial and non-commercial support. You can easily search for any problems you do run into and there will not be some esoteric DISCORD as your support. There are countless forms with literally thousands of people probably somewhat knowledgeable on how to address issues. Things like CUDA and dev work are also extremely supported. My barometer is how much time I have to crap away to get a printer and scanner work. Both of which just work with Linux Mint out of the box.


  • Mint is still basically mint from several years ago. Having tried a dizzying array of them it continues to be easy and hated on because it doesn’t involve text based configing your life away. That said, because it lags behind compared to other distros in updating the kernel, the thing that makes new hardware work, it can have a hard time with things made recently. Try the edge ISO, which has a newer kernel. The team is working on more frequent updates, Wayland (a thing you ideally never have to ever know what it is), and just delivers a comfortable desktop experience since I first screwed up my computers with Linux in 2007.


  • rodbiren@midwest.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlThoughts on CachyOS?
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    6 months ago

    It consistently ran slower on a few benchmarks I care about like language model performance, which was surprising. Baulders Gate was also jankyier for some reason. I love that people are out trying to do this stuff and the community was nice. Just like anything the reality is often less exciting than the marketing. It is bundled together arch with some hopeful optimizations that I am certain will work for some hardware and some applications, but not all hardware and all applications.




  • Well if you are doing work on you computer you find rewarding and it functions I would quit while you are ahead. Getting into distro hopping and caring about Linux internals is a bit like being a car enthusiast. You can either have a car to drive it or have a car that you fart around all the time tweaking bits, replacing it, breaking it, developing strong opionons about things almost no one cares about.

    So to you want to be a driver or an enthusiast? By using Linux at all you can essentially consider yourself part of the “car club”, but there is a whole heck of a lot else to learn.



  • I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

    Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

    Anyways, I’m sure I’m crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can’t even get games to benchmark higher.


  • Well, it turns out only a handful of companies actually make image modules. I would say it is better in terms of US based support, firmware, hardware design, and the fact it meets TAA and buy America compliance. I’ve seen these cameras in the DoD and even in the oval office. If you want a camera that is absolutely not spying on you I can vouch for these because I have watched the firmware get built on these.




  • I’ll take something from 2005 as a compliment to Linux Mint. Having installed it in 2006 you are absolutely correct. It’s shockingly boring lack of constant UI paradigm shifts almost makes me forget about the OS completely. I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I see slow adoption of new things as good. I accept others have setups that mint does not work for, but I would wager there is no Linux DE better suited as a first suggestion to try depending on the newness of the hardware. If you have 5 monitors of differing resolutions and frame rates then sure, there are better DEs.