lproven

:-o

Gosh. OK then.

Holy cr4p that is a wall of text on the repo! :-o

Is that massive amount of bumf machine-generated?

I tried one, and nearly bought one from a friend a couple of years ago, but I can't get over the horrible chiclet keyboard.

Life is too short for modding machines I want to be daily drivers, like fitting an X220 keyboard to it.

Yes, me too. This happened just under 6 months before I was born and I knew nothing about it.

Around the time the _Ever Given_ got stuck, I read a lot about it, although I do not have links any more.

You didn't name the book or link to it.

It's called Stranded in the Six Day War by Cath Senker.

https://cathsenker.co.uk/stranded-in-the-six-day-war/

I wrote a Reg article based on this:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/13/the-improbabl...

I got some valuable links to tunes from a previous HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611230

It was just 3 weeks ago...

Already explained with examples upthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49896422

I have never heard of "Snow Linux" before. The homepage is minimal:

https://snowlinux.org/

I submitted the Github page as a new story:

https://github.com/frostyard/snowdesktop

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907568

Good keyboard is my #1.

If that is good enough, I will put up with a bad screen.

Good speakers is very nice to have, I admit, but I do not do podcasts or videos. I do listen to the radio a lot, however.

I do not own a single laptop with 32GB RAM. That I don't care about. My desktop does, but the biggest laptops are 24GB, which was massively cheaper. Most are 16GB which I find enough for even quite intensive use.

Indeed.

I know of two "best laptops ever made":

Drew DeVault says it's the X200:

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Fucking-laptops/

« The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. »

He has a very strong case. I own one. It is certainly one of the best ever.

On the other hand, Brad Taunt says it is the X220:

https://btxx.org/posts/x220/

« The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. »

Ulaş Türkmen agrees:

https://okigiveup.net/blog/why-thinkpad-x220-is-the-best-lap...

I also have two X220 machines, and I use them more than the X200 now. They still work perfectly, while my X200 is getting flakey. (Although with its SSD and 8GB of RAM, it runs Alpine very well indeed and could be a daily driver.)

The X220 has a slightly shallowed screen; that's a weakness. But mine are 100% usable: between them, I run Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and Pop OS, and all of them go like stink and are daily-drivable on this 2011 hardware.

When I left $DAYJOB-1 they let me keep my Dell Latitude 7270. I have upgraded its RAM to 16GB (the max it takes) and downgraded to a smaller SSD.

It runs ChromeOS Flex and it runs it very quickly indeed. It's a quad-core Core i7, so it should.

This 10YO laptop is in daily use and it runs well enough that an EOL for ChromeOS that is 8Y away is a concern for me. I expect the laptop will still be in use then; I still have several 15Y old Thinkpads in frequent use.

Ignore this poster and their misconfigured browser. It works fine, no paywall, nothing.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727434

Later and with more comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791125

> Wow I remember this being covered in Custom PC, a magazine in the UK.

For which I wrote the Linux column for the mag's first year. :-)

That is amazing. I love the glitterball, emphasizing all that lovely empty space. Fantastic.

FWIW, the Readability extension sorted it in a single click for me.

That is excellent stuff -- thank you!

> as Asahi uses Arch,

Asahi does not use Arch.

It formally made Fedora its official partner three years ago as I reported at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/08/07/asahi-linux-...

It does also support 10 other distros, listed here:

https://leo3418.github.io/asahi-wiki-build/swalternative-dis...

(Deepin is there twice.)

Note, Arch is not on that list.

> The idea that Linux is "half baked" non non-amd64 platforms is just... it's just stunning.

Evidence to support this idea, from a Red Hat developer in the area of ARM support:

His 2015 attempt:

https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2015/09/21/aarch64-desktop...

It failed. Arm on the desktop on Linux was not usable.

A decade later, he tried again.

His 2025 attempt starts here:

https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/07/07/arm-desktop-202...

It failed. Arm on the desktop on Linux was still not usable last year.

I think the proposition that it's half-baked is strong enough to at least discuss, not mock.

Indeed so. Nicely put!

Thanks!

And you know what, that's a great idea.

I had never heard of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%27s_Egg_of_Columbus

> other elements

Phyla?

I'm sorry. I reacted badly. Both you and @zahlman gave the same advice with the same reasoning and I have extensive personal experience that means I know this can cause total data loss.

It is bad and dangerous advice.

If you don't believe me, I can give you the steps to reproduce. Others have posted comments to this effect here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768833

Seeing it twice in one thread, I overreacted.

I apologise for my confrontational tone.

I reacted badly when I see people giving what is, in my extensive personal experience, bad and dangerous advice that will lead to significant data loss.

It's as if I saw someone advising DIY facial piercing with a nailgun. I didn't stop to consider any motivation; my reaction is an immediate NO DON'T DO THAT!

True! (This stuff is since my BSc and I need to do more reading, but it isn't my job, so there's no time.)

But the thing is that, AIUI, ATP-synthase is in the mitochondria and chloroplasts, so from an evolutionary perspective it is in prokaryotes... just symbiotic ones...

Exactly.

SUSE takes snapshots before packages are installed. The package manager cannot tell if the disk will fill up as a result because on Btrfs the `df` command lies.

If its Btrfs root fills up and the OS writes to it, it 100% will self-destruct, and the `btrfs-repair` tool (`fsck` replacement) cannot fix drives and usually makes the corruption worse and renders the drive unreadable.

This is why in the earlier thread about swapfiles...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618087

... I advised 2 commenters not to recommend keeping the OS and data in a single big volume. I got downvoted for it. I was rude. Well, I was, but I stand by my comments even though I'm sorry for my tone when I made them.

It worked well. I used a few V20 and V30 PCs.

One very nice little win:

If you had an NEC chip, then Windows 3.0 ran in colour VGA mode. If you had an Intel chip, it wouldn't.

The VGA device driver was 286 code and the assumption was that VGA chips were only in 286 PCs.

(IBM's own 8086 and later very-low-end 80286 PS/2 machines, both called the Model 30, did not have VGA which was only in Microchannel machines; they had the inferior MCGA instead.)

If you had an 8088/8086 PC with VGA you couldn't run Win 3.0 in VGA mode. If you fit a V20 (instead of an 8088) or V30 (instead of an 8086), you could run Win 3.0 in colour VGA mode.

In 1990 this was the first mass-deployed 286-specific code a lot of people ever encountered: a device driver.

Lotus 1-2-3 r3 was 286-specific but it was niche; you could just stay on 1-2-3 r2 which worked fine on everything. Almost all other DOS apps were for 8088/8086.

The 80186 was so rare it wasn't even mentioned: the distinction was 8086 code or 80286 code. So this was a rare instance of Real Mode 286 code -- plain old unextended DOS 16-bit code, as opposed to Protected Mode code that needed an actual 80286 chip.

Citations:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/antique-display-driving/

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=53942

> Difficulty level: quite high, even in reader mode.

Works fine in Firefox on macOS 15 here.

General tip...

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/