24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

… but it has a habit of corrupting profile files on shutdown.

The slower your imap the faster the freeze, Gmail works best.

My previous laptop was a similar Lenovo X1 Carbon with Debian and wow do I miss it, but I don't have too much of a choice since I do mobile app development :(

That and also ultra-wide tabs which change in size as you close them with a middle click, which is really annoying and you sometimes close the wrong tab. Close them with the cross and they stay the same size and neatly collapse, you can even then middle click to close the remainder and they stay the same size. Silly difference in behaviour IMO.

It's the little things that put me off. Shame, as Passkey support is great.

Desktop distros switching to a more user-friendly scheduler, and loading a ‘small speaker’ EQ via Pulse on detecting internal speakers (= laptop) are two massive, low-hanging fruit improvements for Linux that just don’t seem to be done.

If you want a good Linux experience, you should look for hardware with first class Linux support. Likewise, good luck with macOS on non-Apple hardware--it's possible but ymmv

Thats a good description for many linux GUIs. They look like they can get the job done, but to really get the job done, you have to use what the developers of said UI likely themself use - the terminal.

From my own personal experience, no. My machines can become unusable from a simple Windows Update.

But if you think the registry could be replaced with .ini files like the good ol' days, that's a pretty extreme hot take. If you're open to changing your perspective on what the registry is for, how it is designed, and why it's necessary, read any of the Windows Internals books.

Group policies have replaced the registry for advanced configuration of the OS. The only time I’ve needed to change the registry is for dealing with poorly written, old drivers, which are becoming more rare as Microsoft’s standards for getting a driver signed are becoming more stringent.

They seem to have sunk without a trace.

The process may well never exit that state, for example if the I/O it's waiting for is actually over a networked filesystem and the NIC is misbehaving.

Regular users don't understand CPU quotas. It should be done by default. The current behavior on Windows/Mac/Linux of allowing a program to make the machine uncontrollable is poor.

To be honest (and I'm aware that I might be tarred and feathered for this) I kinda prefer the centralized Windows registry to the "random assortment of config files" approach that Linux has. I think both Windows and Linux give you that feeling of carefully crawling around in ventilation ducts once you get your hands dirty; I doubt it's possible to get rid of that without getting rid of the inherent flexibility that the systems provide. There's a reason Windows has both the registry and the Settings app.

Full io access and unlimited kill power, far better than ctrl alt delete...

Any regressions in this area I blame on systemd, which I think runs on cpp, so you know I blame cpp... (kernel is written in c, windows got a bit better when they used c# instead of cpp, Mac never used cpp...everybody kill cpp, quick)

That said, my home PC works since 2018 (buy date) and one at work since around 2016. Only used these backups once to move OS to a new SSD.

Most failures happen when you have no backups, so have at least one to make your system failsafe!

Sometimes not though, like startup times, but there is not so many use cases that this counts, like 1password starts slower with each release.

Holding your own code to a high standard is great, but wouldn’t it be nicer if you could offload more of that into the tooling and spend more time on the problem or making the code even cleaner?

Also as a side note: I always find it funny that a flag that represents all warnings doesn’t actually turn on all warnings.

The full quote, because it always gets butchered to "premature optimization is the root of all evil":

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Now with windows 10 on a much faster pc, clicking apps like Firefox, the start menu, word take seconds to load.

I recently fired up my windows 7 VM to mod an old game console and it was exactly how I remembered. You click something and it's instantly opened.

For example, properly displaying text now requires having a copy of at least the most important parts of the Unicode standard in memory. Things like knowing if a character occupies one, two, or many character cells are very important for even a simple text terminal. Word splitting, kerning, shaping, bi–directional text display, the number of possible refinements grows without bound and all of them need metadata about each and every character. Your average web browser has megabytes of the stuff just sitting around in memory so that it is ready as soon as a character has to go up on the screen. Older computer just didn’t have that kind of memory to spare.

If you want the old–school experience you can still boot straight into the Linux Console, which still thinks that there are only 256 characters. It seems to be reasonably snappy.

I suppose you could put a ton of OS and libraries in a (modern equiv of EEP)ROM for immediate access. The original Macintosh was kinda like that. But things went the other way when disk storage dropped in price a lot faster than chip storage.

Maybe we're back to a point where the former is economically viable, but there would be a lot of historic baggage to overcome.

A modern bios goes through more cycles during the boot phase of a typical machine than a C64 would see in its entire lifetime.

You could if you really want to...

https://8051enthusiast.github.io/2020/04/14/003-Stream_Video...

Is this true on modern Linux DEs (e.g. on KDE Plasma)?

Is it also true on Windows and macOS?

this already happens, just after some laughably long chain of unprocessed input events

So "real" or not but from my experience HT does work to the benefit.

And in these days of post-Dennard scaling, you have thermal throttling, so idle cycles aren’t actually idle, they’re allowing the heat sink to catch up with heat production.

I had just upgraded to an i7-3770K (8 threads, 4 cores) from a Core 2 Quad (4 threads, 4 cores). I did a POV-Ray render several times using 1, 2, 4, and 8 threads. 2 was nearly double the speed of 1, 4 was nearly double the speed of 2, but 8 was only about 15% faster than 4.

To ensure I wasn't bottlenecking RAM at that level, I tried again with 2 threads, but forced both threads onto a single core, and it was only 15% faster than 1 thread.

That was all the proof I needed of how you really can't treat two CPU threads as two cores.

That said, I've never personally found an instance where allowing a processes to span all CPU threads actually reduced performance, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a real-world case where it does. It's usually something contrived.