supermarkus

u/supermarkus@feddit.org
406 posts · 47 comments

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on I hate Android! · c/mildlyinfuriating · 3 pts · 10d

I personally wouldn’t use a phone with 4GB unless my usecase was fairly basic. If you are running multiple (Heavy) websites and apps the system will need to use swap will slow down multitasking.

A couple of months ago I revived an old x86 tablet using postmarketOS. No Android anywhere. The only somewhat usable browser I could find was Falkon. Firefox was absolutely unusable. Ungoogled Chromium was a bit better but overall still shitty. Opening a second tab under Falkon was too much as well. The problematic component was 100% the web browser and there Firefox specifically. OP writes that he opened Firefox and I can confirm from my own experience of using Firefox on a RAM constrained non-Android device that FF is terrible in such scenarios. FF is great otherwise but not when RAM is low.

The choices kinda look like they would both either explicitly or in effect disallow practically all LLMs. Nice.

From what I see so far, there is a loophole. LLMs may not be used to generate source packages but if Claude generates a script that then does the work and the script stays private and isn't official Debian software, it's fine.

This may be an oversight or deliberate. No idea.

Shame that Peugeot was given such a bad BOP, again.

When BoP was still public, Peugeot usually got among the best BoP numbers. It's just their ground effect concept (even after the introduction of the rear wing) is idiotic. Luckily for them the new 2030 regs will save them from themselves by mandating most of the aero surfaces.

Aston Martin has a similar problem.

The difference being that in the one of those cases you still need to open a browser instance before you are able to browse the web.

Firefox is absolutely unusable on that PC. Falkon runs much better.

And if you’re trying to be economical about RAM usage, things like fancy window decorations, window animations, and other purely aesthetic stuff like that can of course go.

That's negligible at best and imaginary at worst. Themes that aren't used, aren't loaded into RAM.

I was playing around with an old laptop dual booting Fedora KDE and W11. And Fedora on fresh boot was using the same/more ram than 11.

Windows compresses RAM these days, not sure if Fedora does by default. Also, by itself Windows is surprisingly RAM efficient. I think it's a holdover from Windows 8 which was developed for tablets when Microsoft tried competing with iPads.

The problems arise when web views like the news widget load. Then all the past optimizations no longer matter.

Also I don’t think KDE even uses more RAM than other DEs that are designed to be lightweight. Last time I compared, it used the same or less memory as LXDE.

Firefox without any website loaded uses more RAM than a full Plasma session.

XFCE is great for mid-range old devices, and LXQt is great for dogshit old devices.

What's this device in your scale from old doghit to old mid-range?

Runs a full Plasma session just fine. The problem isn't the desktop, it's the web browsers, especially Firefox. Falkon runs OK.

In essence it's not much different than regular Linux distributions. There are some quirks related to pmOS being a derivative of Alpine Linux. It uses musl instead of glibc, so don't expect meaningful NVidia support. Other than that, it's regular kernel, regular Mesa. (Native package selection is much smaller than anything mainstream, Flatpak works, though.)

I couldn't get a stable WiFi connection using WPA3 Personal. Not sure what the fault is. Switching the connection over to WPA2 in Plasma's Network settings did the trick. This PC's trackpad and touchscreen work absolutely fine but – and I think that's how the hardware is designed and nothing to do with pmOS – the trackpad doesn't show up as trackpad but as a mouse. So I cannot reconfigure it to use two finger scrolling. Scrolling is always on the left edge.

Websites claim that this PC supports bluetooth but the adapter doesn't show. As I wrote in another comment, I suspect a hardware defect, given how abnormally unstable Windows 10 was. I need to get my hands on a USB Bluetooth dongle. I use my headphones via USB in the meantime which physically tethers me to the device but works fine.