eugenia

eugenia, 17 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

I’ve been putting together a lot of old laptops for friends and family, so here’s my opinion based on my experience:

Your CPU speed is ok (that CPU scores 932 passmark points, which is ok for dekstop usage and youtube at 360p (you should set up his youtube at 360p, and to not autoplay). If this was Chrome, that cpu could do 480p, but firefox is much slower than chrome on youtube. The difference in speed is not visible on fast systems, but it is visible on very old ones (anything less than 1500 passmark points).

Your biggest problem is the RAM. You have only 2.77 GB of RAM, which is NOT enough for normal web browsing in this day and age – if you’re using lots of tabs. The moment you will open more than 2-3 tabs with heavy websites (e.g. facebook, nytimes, and linkedin), you will start swapping like crazy with Cinnamon. So your user will always have to be conscious of what apps they have open (and make sure you configure 4 GB of swap too, just in case).

Mate and XFCE should be using less RAM, indeed (about 600-800 MB instead of 1.3 GB on Cinnamon). I find XFCE more stable personally, and it only uses 100 MB more RAM than Mate on average. The only good thing Mate has over XFCE is that it comes with a user administrative gui app. I usually install that on xfce (“mate-user-admin”).

eugenia, 18 days ago

For graphics stuff you will be using Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita. No adjustment layers, or cmyk, sorry. If that is enough for you, good, if not, you’re out of luck.

For 3D modelling, only Blender.

For video, DaVinci only works sometimes, depending on distro, version of the app, drivers installed etc. It’s a bit of a crapshoot. A good alternative is kdenlive if you don’t need hardware acceleration, proper color grading and film emulation, or compositing.

Google laid off most Dart/Flutter developers just a week ago or so.

Thunar for file manager, not Nautilus. Nautilus crashes in folders that has hundreds of svg files in it (e.g. a theme folder), or when you’re trying to copy a 30 gb folder to a new folder on the same secondary drive (it only copied 9 GB out of the 30, all files were owned by me). Both bugs bit me just the other day.

eugenia, 18 days ago

While the normal Debian has outdated packages as you said, I’m using Debian-testing (rolling release), and it works great for me. It has newer packages, and it’s surprisingly stable. In my experience, more stable than Arch, and it has a larger repo than Tumbleweed.

eugenia, 19 days ago

Woman here. I met my husband on IRC, on a channel about BeOS, 24 years ago. So don’t knock the internet or the bar as potential ways to find someone. If you’re meant to be together, it can happen anywhere.

eugenia, 21 days ago

The replies here are good. Different rendering engines. Also, try another font. Like Roboto, or Inter, by Google.

eugenia, 21 days ago

Woman over 30 here. I just keep a bottle of water, and in the summer, an electric infuser that thwarts mosquitos (too many in my area). I make a point to not have phones or alarm clocks by.

eugenia, 22 days ago

It’s just a buggy installer. I had a similar crash problem with an HP PC.

eugenia, 22 days ago

4 GB of RAM is enough only if you install something like Debian+XFce (not gnome/kde/cinnamon or ubuntu/fedora), and only if you only use up to 3-4 tabs of web browser at the same time along 1 more app. Basically, you will need to always be conscious about the things you have open. But it is doable if you are the conscious user type like I am. Definitely not enough for things like 4k video editing, or multiple apps open with many tabs open each. Also, always go for the x86 version, it’s better supported.

eugenia, 23 days ago

FreeCAD is what you need for 3D cad/cam or 3d printing. And for 2D cad, or 2D cad/cam, there’s the free GPL version of QCad (recommended to buy the full version for $40 to get cad/cam and more import/export file support from autocad). Anything else (librecad, openscad, Design etc) are not as well rounded imho. And then there’s onshape, but that’s not Free software.

eugenia, 24 days ago

TWO of my laptops were bit by that bug/error. Not one. Two.

But what they offered was not a real solution. I’m an experienced computer user, and still didn’t wanna mess with that “solution”.

This was done just to force people to upgrade to a Win11 (and maybe get a new PC too, if their old one couldn’t run Win11). If not that, then simply, incompetence in general.

It’s all laughable, really.

eugenia, 24 days ago

Both my laptops were Win10-native, not upgrades from previous versions.

eugenia, 24 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

Reading the bug report about all that ( gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/…/288 ), it’s crazy to see how the gnome dev (Red Hat employee) replies to the issue. He completely ignores the issue in the beginning, then that he doesn’t care to follow the spec because it’s “old”, and yet, he still advertises to the OS as an fdo theme, so OSes ship with it. He’s hurting non-gnome apps, and he simply doesn’t seem to care about it. To me, this shows a person who simply doesn’t care about ecosystem.

eugenia, 26 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

In December of 1994, in Greece, finally my parents agreed to get me a computer, as I was finishing college (was studying to be a computer programmer). I come from a very poor family, so it took some convincing. I ordered a modest 486 DX-40 Mhz, with 4 MB of RAM (10 months later it had to be updated to 8 MB in order to run Win95), 4x CD-ROM, 1.44 floppy drive, and a 420 MB Conner HDD. It had a Cirrus Logic graphics card (which I later upgraded to an S3), and a plain soundblaster sound card. The monitor was an 800x600 14" CRT monitor, and I think I also got a joystick with it too. I ran Win3.1 originally, and DOS. I was programming mainly in Turbo Pascal, and dBase III.

The only “computer” we had at home before that, was an Atari 2600, that I bought my brother as a gift, in a yard sale in 1991, Germany. Already extremely outdated by that time, but that was the only one I could afford (I was in Germany for 8 months in early 1990s, before I went to college back in Greece, working menial jobs: janitor, kitchen help).

I installed a bunch of shareware games found on magazines when I got the 486, so I got viruses a couple of times too because of that (Greek PC magazines at the time weren’t as careful as they should have been). I had no access to the internet or BBS, you see. It had to be through magazines, especially since almost no one else in my small town had a computer at the time to share software with.

That’s the computer I had when I moved to the UK in late 1996, to go work as a programmer there. I got paid well there, so I upgraded a few times, particularly the graphics card (at one point I had a voodoo SLI).

When I got married and left for the US in 2001, I had a dual Celeron at 333 Mhz, 128 MB RAM, and an nVidia TNT2 Ultra.

I got a cellphone for the first time in 2003 I think, some Nokia ones I think. I was writing tech reviews online, so companies were sending me loaners to review. However, my phone usage was spotty, since I was on a pay-as-you-go (with limited, or no data plan) for about 10 years. It took the 2010s for me to get a family plan, with enough data. I did get my hands on the first iphone though, and the first android too (my husband was part of the original android team at the time, at Google). These days, I’m back in Greece as of the beginning of this year, and I run Murena e/OS, the de-googled version of Android that is privacy-focused (based on LineageOS).

eugenia, 28 days ago

Just because Gnome has a top panel doesn’t mean it tried to copy MacOSX. Gnome tried to copy phone UIs (that have a top panel), not Mac or Windows. And that was the reason why many disliked Gnome, in fact. It seems that it’s optimizing for tablets and phones, while it’s running on desktops.

eugenia, 29 days ago

Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I’ve been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.

In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn’t find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I’m using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I’m too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.

As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I’ve lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I’m now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more “restrictively open” something can be, the better. Don’t allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.

eugenia, 1 month ago

The way I usually use cable internet, is to connect another router via ethernet to the cable modem/router, and then connect all my devices to that second router. This way, I could use the provider’s router (sometimes the model they provide can’t be changed), and at the same time use a better router for my devices.

eugenia, 1 month ago

I don’t think there’s any.

eugenia, 1 month ago

Three things:

1. The kernel version they got. I have had hardware that didn’t work in one distro but it did on another, but their difference really was that one had kernel 5.11 and then other one 6.5. Big difference in terms of support.
2. Might not be a matter of driver, but a matter of firmware. If a distro allows the download/usage of third party non-free firmware code or not, a lot more hardware is supported. Not all distros do that.
3. If it’s ubuntu or ubuntu-based. Ubuntu has incorporated a lot of additional drivers/firmwares/support in their kernel versions than most others.

eugenia, 1 month ago

I personally find Mate being buggy. Panel items move around after logins. XFce is much more stable. The only advantage mate has is that it’s using about 100 MB less ram, and that it has a user management front end, that xfce lacks. Other than that, I found xfce superior.

eugenia, 1 month ago

My dad would always smoke at home. It was what it was, standard in Greece at the time, so what could I do? Ask him not to smoke so I could get beaten up? So I survived by shutting up and leaving home after 18.

eugenia, 1 month ago

Because it uses 250 MB of RAM on a well-optimized distro (e.g. installing it on DietPi), instead of 1.5 GB of RAM.

eugenia, 1 month ago

We’re talking about a whole desktop environment, not “gtk tools”. Both lxde and lxqt are lightweight, and have more utilities and prefs than the standard window managers, or the old stuff, like icewm.

eugenia, 1 month ago

The Matrix (1999). The one existential movie for all. Then, it’s probably “Serenity” (2005). Then, probably Galaxy Quest (1999).

eugenia, 1 month ago

According to all the Greeks. Including myself.

eugenia, 1 month ago

Please stop trolling. I’m Greek, I live in Greece, and that’s how things are. Greeks don’t eat lamb kofta or kebab, that’s a middle eastern thing only. Greeks eat shaved pork, or shaved chicken. No beef or lamb ground meat in their fast food. They might look similar, but they’re not. The West has this idea that Greeks eat kebab, because many Middle Eastern people have opened shops in Europe and US calling their shops “mediterranean” or even “Greek”, while not being so. I’ve lived for 25 years in Germany, UK and US, and especially in the US, the only “Greek” souvlaki shops I could find in California were actually not Greek, they were kebab houses. Authentic greek souvlaki/pitas I found only in NY, and in 1 shop in Utah all these years. None in California (they were real Greek restaurants, but not souvlaki/pita places – these are different, since they’re street food).