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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • In my very limited experience with my 5400rpm SMR WD disk, it’s perfectly capable of writing at over 100 MB/s until its cache runs out, then it pretty much dies until it has time to properly write the data, rinse and repeat.

    40 MB/s sustained is weird (but maybe it’s just a different firmware? I think my disk was able to actually sustain 60 MB/s for a few hours when I limited the write speed, 40 could be a conservative setting that doesn’t even slowly fill the cache)





  • Then what’s the meaning of this whole part?

    On non-corpo linux syslog can be disabled if you want, though I’d prefer to just symlink/mount /var/log to a memory filesystem instead.

    Is it just a random tidbit that could be replaced with a blueberry muffin recipe without any change of meaning of the whole comment? Because it sure won’t help OP at all with their Arch-specific question, so it’s either that, or it provides contrast to the “corpo Linux”, which is how I interpreted it.

    And here’s the remaining part of your comment I left out, just to make sure people won’t lose the context between two three sentence long comments (for those without any attention span, it comes before the previous quoted part):

    If you’re on arch you use redhat’s garbage.



  • apps that are programmed by a 13 year old that wants to scam people.

    That’s a weird way to spell “project manager who doesn’t let developers waste time making efficient apps when they could just add more marketable features”. The competition won’t hesitate, and users will always flock to apps with more features and nicer UI over optimizations.

    People need to learn how to close apps.

    If you have enough RAM, there’s no reason to - it’s not like they are actually running and consuming CPU cycles. If you don’t have enough RAM, you also don’t need to - Android will do it for you. My phone with 3 GB of RAM could barely handle maps and a browser at once, so there were plenty of times when the map app restarted and recentered on my current position when I came back from checking the website of whatever company I looked at.

    The recent apps screen is really just a history of open apps, with some of them maybe still in memory, and with some opaque mechanism for automatically removing old entries. You can reboot your phone and the apps will still be there with a screenshot of their last state. Doesn’t mean they will get back to that state when you switch to them.


  • The huge amount of RAM on Android in general is less about supporting a single hungry app and more about keeping as many apps as possible in memory so that you can multitask between them without any of them losing their state. If one app manages to eat most of the memory, then it’s already too little for the intended experience.

    Also the memory is supposed to be enough for at least the 7 years this phone will be supported for - that’s plenty of time for apps memory footprint to grow.

    Maybe I’m biased by always having used devices with RAM size in the lower end (which is always also coupled by a not-so-great CPU so when you do run out of memory and the system starts killing apps you want to multitask between, you’re going to notice it that much more), but I’ll always take more RAM in a device that might survive a decade with a couple of battery swaps.





  • How is it open source?

    How is it not? Open source doesn’t mean you have to accept other people’s code. And it is perfectly valid to only dump code for every release, even some GNU projects (like GCC) used to work that way. Hell, there’s even a book about the two different approaches in open source.

    So whatever benefit you were hoping to get from Nvidia’s kernel modules being open source probably is not there.

    It allowed the actual in-tree nouveau kernel module to take the code for interacting with the GSP firmware to allow changing GPU clock speed - in other words no more being stuck on the lowest possible frequency like with the GTX 10 series cards. Seems like a pretty decent benefit to me.


  • I know people say that you don’t NEED an SD card if you buy the most expensive version and rely heavily on cloud services but it’s definitely an intentionally worse customer experience.

    Honestly, this depends entirely on the user. My previous phone had 64 GB internal storage and an SD card slot, but I never felt any reason to use it - all I need is enough storage to hold the photos I take until I get home and copy them to a hard disk (which then periodically gets backed up to another hard disk stored at a relative’s house). Then I can delete most photos and videos and keep only a few that I think I might want to share.

    I’m not saying this is a workflow that everyone would find acceptable, just showing that different people can have vastly different needs. I personally definitely don’t need an SD card if I have 20 GB+ available for my photos, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem with 128 GB being the baseline for current Pixels.

    Of course that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop ragging on Google for taking away features with obvious intention of creating problems for a portion of the userbase and selling the solution. There’s no reason Pixels can’t have an SD card slot at their current price.

    Now it feels like I’m limited to Samsung or Google if I want a flagship SoC…

    Google’s Tensor is definitely not a flagship SoC (Tensor 5 is rumored to change that, but its launch is still far in the future and there’s no guarantee it actually lives up to these rumors), so it seems like deciding on the vendor should be pretty easy if you don’t mind Samsung’s OneUI