I have a Framework 16. Is it as well-built, efficient, or quiet as a MacBook Pro? Nope. But if something breaks I can easily replace it, and I can upgrade it without having to throw everything away. Also, hot-swappable ports. That’s nice too.
It’s all about trade-offs in the end.
Someone ziptied the ring to a 10 mm wrench socket. Wrench sockets have a reputation for inexplicably getting lost, never to be found again.
I know I sorted by feed by Top 6 Hours but that doesn’t mean I expect six hours worth of text in a single image. Did they copy and paste three different job postings together? Did they use a LLM that had its stop token configured incorrectly? Is it an attempt at weeding out people who object to having their time wasted by corporate bullshit?
We may never know. What we do know is that this wall of text has more red flags than a Chinese military parade.
That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.
I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can’t easily facilitate that then it’s not quite RTM for my use case.
If you use a .local domain, your device MUST ask the mDNS address (224.0.0.251 or FF02::FB) and MAY ask another DNS provider. Successful resolution without mDNS is not an intended feature but something that just happens to work sometimes. There’s a reason why the user interfaces of devices like Ubiquiti gateways warn against assigning a name ending in .local to any device.
I personally have all of my locally-assigned names end with .lan, although I’m considering switching to a sub-subdomain of a domain I own (so instead of mycomputer.lan I’d have mycomputer.home.mydomain.tld). That would make the names much longer but would protect me against some asshat buying .lan as a new gTLD.
It is a well-designed system font. Say what you will about Microsoft but they do know how to make a good font or two.
I remember a friend of mine once ordering a Double Triple Whopper and being annoyed that Burger King’s definition of “double” is “with one extra patty”. So he had to order a Double Double Double Triple Whopper to get the desired result.
They delivered the thing to our table together with a knife and fork. I guess ordering an unholy totem pole of meat like that gets you table service at a BK.
The other thing that was notable about it was that the three "Double"s only added three patties to the burger and nothing else. As a result this caricature of a burger was now 80% overcooked ground beef and extremely dry.
He ate half of it. We took the other half home, put it in the microwave and drowned it in ketchup, which greatly increased it’s edibility. It still sucked, though.
There is one metric where Intel is better and that’s Thunderbolt. You typically get more full-featured Thunderbolt ports with an Intel CPU. Of course whether that point is relevant is highly dependent on your use case.
A second computer with a password manager, duh. Of course to unlock that you need a third computer…
Good idea. Losing them in there would be a hassle.
Ah, so they actually got that implemented. Nice.
Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It’s a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.
Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.
For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn’t even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can’t talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you’re SOL.
Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.
Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.
By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.
These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)
Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.
Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.
Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.
Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.
In my experience rear-mounted sensors are the most accurate, closely followed by under-screen sensors. Side-mounted sensors are utter garbage.
Accuracy isn’t even that much of an issue, it’s that the side-mounted ones are far too easy to accidentally trigger just by handling the phone. I can’t count the number of times my last two phones told me I had three incorrect fingerprint attempts after I had just pulled them out of my pocket.
Then I got a Pixel and I have no more such issues and virtually perfect accuracy. Same on a Samsung tablet. Same on an old phone I had where the power button was on the rear and had a full-size sensor.
Basically, I’m perfectly happy with any front- or rear-mounted full-size sensor. Those tiny side-mounted ones suck.
It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.
Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.
But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.
Yeah, the 13 feels a lot more solid. The 16 pays a certain price for its enhanced configurability. Honestly, though, a full-size touchpad module would go a long way to fixing that. The two spacers next to the keyboard look fine (if the keyboard is centered) but the touchpad spacers look less great.