Comments on: A really good computer setup

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 04:14:59 +0000

In reply to Richard Chapman. Exactly. The SSD I'm using as my way larger than needed swap was almost $200 when I bought it a few years ago (and for about a year it went mostly unused so it is low mileage), and the 1 terabyte one I just put in was under $200.

By: Richard Chapman

Richard Chapman — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 02:22:06 +0000

I use KDE but I’ve had trouble with it flaking out on me. When it does that I switch to xfce for a while. My motherboard was issued in April 2017 so it’s still kind of new. That may be some of the problem. When I built my computer in September 2017 the Linux kernel had only been working on my motherboard since the July release. It’s been slowly getting better. Anyway, I always build my computers. One of the main reasons is I don’t want to pay the Microsoft Tax. The other is to have control over the components. You are right of course about manufactured computers. I recently replaced a Dell computer that failed for some unknown reason with a similar HP for my Mother in Law. She simply couldn’t afford one I could build for her and she needed a Microsoft partition anyway. The specifications are just enough to run KDE and it does so without any trouble. I too use a SSD for my main drive and a regular hard drive for a backup. It’s only 250GB. My reasoning is that they’re good for about 5 years. In about 4 years when is near time to replace it, SSDs will be much, much cheaper, bigger and longer lasting. Time is on my side.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 16:30:35 +0000

In reply to Steve Plegge. Steve: Yup, it is working great. The real test my be putting it on my older laptop!

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 16:30:05 +0000

In reply to Joseph Shelby. To some extent, it may be KDE standing still while the other desktops become more drenched in molasses. But it is also true that recent benchmarking shows KDE Plasma of today using half the resources its own earlier incarnation used a year or so ago. KDE made a strong effort to decrease its footprint.

By: Joseph Shelby

Joseph Shelby — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 14:54:36 +0000

“If you were thinking KDE takes up a lot of resources compared to other systems, be informed: Not these days. They made it very efficient.”

Either very efficient, or also as likely that they just didn’t make it any worse, and Moore’s Law did the rest. Desktop environments, like browsers, keep pushing the edge for what is ‘fast’, as the libraries get deeper and deeper in abstraction layers and code bundles full of stuff you don’t need just to get 1 method you do. Loading (and ignoring) all that code uses up time and memory. KDE’s focus on stability rather than new flashy features has given them the Moore’s Law advantage: they’re not adding much code but the processors are almost twice as fast as 3 years ago.

The node.js / npm architecture is horrible for this sort of thing, where packages load the entirety of, say, lodash just to get one efficient array sorter – the weight of the package isn’t worth the speed of the one method you need.

By: Steve Plegge

Steve Plegge — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 08:34:06 +0000

I told you that you’d like KDE!

Glad it’s working out for you.