areyouevenreal @ areyouevenreal @lemm.ee

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9

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976

Joined

2 yr. ago

Why are you so negative?

Not all user friendly distros have a parent distro. Checkout Solus.

There are sometimes things upstream causing problems. The Linux kernel itself isn't one of them though as Linus is pretty adamant that Linux distributions should be easy to setup and use. KDE is also designed to be pretty friendly while being customizable still. The main issues seem to come from apps and distributions.

I mean yes, how exactly would you want the web to work? In order for it to be secure we need website code to run in an isolated environment. Modern web browsers have gotten pretty good at this.

Though we say it's a JavaScript Virtual Machine it's not the kind of virtual machine you are thinking of. It just means it's being interpreted in a certain environment rather than compiles code running natively. It's not like a whole OS. Running a web browser in a Virtual Machine is unironically a method to improve security; checkout Qubes OS for an example.

Also the permissions it's asking for aren't that serious. Basically GPU access and download folder access.

Point being I've used tech from the era before smartphones.

That's a fraction of the life of a single car, for an AI model used by millions of people. AI isn't that big of an energy consumer if done right it seems. Look at how much energy data centers used before the AI shenanigans, or how much Bitcoin uses.

I struggled majorly with XDCC weirdly enough.

Most ISPs I have seen these days actually block stuff properly. DNS hacks are no longer sufficient. Luckily VPNs are cheap these days.

Weirdly enough I have never used that feature. Only found out about it after I started using Usenet and the *arr stack. Now if I want to search for something manually I use Prowlarr that allows me to search both Usenet and Bittorrent at the same time.

The rest of the time Radarr or Sonarr finds it for me.

Usenet seems to work really well, and can be surprisingly cheap. Try FrugalUsenet. If you want both VPN and Usenet then try something like Eweka. They do deals where you get both Usenet access and a cheap VPN. It's about €105 for 15 months or €6.99 per month.

I was born in 2001. I didn't use a smartphone until I was like 16. We grew up with regular computers too. I also grew up with Windows XP and 7, as well as playing Doom using DosBox. Then again I am a computer science graduate, so maybe not the best example.

Depends on if they make you pay to reschedule

My bad

Wayland isn't actually a piece of software though. It's a protocol. This isn't like X11.

Hey leave stdio and stdlib out of this!

You don't get it. We are saying that the same people who want to close down libraries are also the ones causing more people to become homeless and/or closing down homeless shelters.

No they probably shouldn't be jerking off at a library, but they don't have anywhere else to do it. Maybe if you had been homeless you might understand.

Good, laws are shit anyway. Especially copyright laws.

I guess if you don't want it that's fair. It is though the best way to obtain things like the hogwarts game where we don't want to give money to the author. Not that that is my sort of game, but I have obtained copies for other people.

You could just pirate it

But generally speaking, ARM pushes for going wide, and X86 pushes for more IPC on fewer cores (pipelining, out of order execution, etc).

Going wide also means having more superscalar units and therefore getting better IPC. You also don't really understand what pipelining does. Using pipeling increases IPC versus not pipe-lining sure, but adding more stages actually can reduce IPC as with the Pentium 4. This is because it increases the penalty for misprediction and branching. Excessive pipeline stages in a time before modern branch predictors is what made the pentium 4 suck. The reason to add more stages is to increase clockspeed (pentium 4) or to bring in more complicated instructions. The way you talk about this stuff tells me you don't actually understand what's going on or why.

Also x86 has had memory controllers on CPUs for well over a decade now. Likewise PCIe, USB, and various other things have also been moved to the CPU - north-bridges don't even exist anymore. Some even integrate the southbridge too to make an SoC much like a smartphone. None of this is actually relevant to the architecture though, they are entirely down to form factor, engineering decisions, and changes in technology which are relevant to the specific chip or product. If x86 had succeeded more in smartphones and ARM had taken the desktop (as was there original intention) then you would be stood here talking about x86 chips including more functions and ARM chips having separate chipsets. So this isn't a fair thing to use to compare x86 and ARM.

It's also not really true that x86 has fewer cores. A modern Ryzen in even a laptop form factor can have up to 16. That's more than Apple put in their mobile chips. I get why people think this way. It's because phones had 8 cores long before PCs, and because it made sense at the time. When ARM cores were smaller and narrower and had much less per-core performance and IPC increasing their number made sense. Likewise more smaller cores is more energy efficient than fewer bigger cores, and this makes sense for something like a smartphone. However nowadays when big, wide, power hungry ARM cores exist and are used in higher power form factors than a smartphone there isn't really the need to have so many. At the same time x86 have efficient small cores these days that in some cases get better performance per watt than their ARM equivalents, and x86 core count has skyrocketed. Both of these platforms were originally focused on per core performance too, as multi-core consumer devices simply weren't a thing. All of this "ARM has more cores and x86 has more single core performance" malarkey was only true for a certain window of time. It wasn't where this all started and it's not where we are going now. Instead what we are seeing is convergent design where ARM and X86 are being used in the same use cases, using the same design concepts, and maybe eventually one will replace the other. Only time will tell.

If you were comparing x86 vs RISC-V you might not be far off. But with ARM vs x86 they have basically the same use cases. Namely desktops, laptops, servers, networking equipment, game consoles, set top boxes, and so on. x86 even used to be used in mobile phones or even as a microcontroller. It's not used in those applications as much now obviously, but it's very much possible. Originally ARM was developed for the desktop too, and was designed for high performance. Lookup the Acorn Archimedes. When people say ARM is coming to the desktop they really should be saying ARM is coming back to the desktop, since that's where it started from.

You're also not correct on the clock speed and IPC front. For a long time Apple's ARM implementation had better IPC than x86 chips. The whole point of RISC is that you can get better clock speeds and execute more instructions vs CISC having more complex instructions being executed more slowly. The only really correct part is that x86 chips are more pipelined. This is due to them being CISC essentially and needing more stages to hit the same clockspeed. Apple's ARM makes up for this by having more superscalar units than x86 chips, allowing for greater IPC.

Putting graphics and video compression stuff on x86 chips isn't new either. That's a question of system design, not of x86 vs ARM. In the server market you get ARM chips that are CPU only. Both also come paired with FPGAs. So it's not even fair to say ARM has more accelerators on chip. Also any ARM chip with PCIe (such as the server ones) can take advantage of the same co-processors that x86 can, the only limitations being drivers and software.

Since when did AMD make ARM chips? Also they aren't as different as a motorcycle and a car. It's more like compression ignition vs spark ignition. They are largely used in the same applications (or might be in the future), although some specific use cases work better with one or the other. Much like how cars can use either petrol or diesel, but say a large ship is better to use compression ignition and a motorcycle to use spark ignition.