“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
Is there an old AARCH64 laptop (sub-$100, preferably closer to $50) that can be picked up for a song for playing around with crap like this?
From what I can tell, there’s a lot of crappy old ARM Chromebooks; I wonder if they perform sufficiently faster than an RPi and work well enough with a Linux distro to mess with them. I do wonder, though, if any Windows-on-ARM ones are old enough to also be cheap used (and not be some sort of Windows RT terror or something).
Oh yeh. I heard that, just forgot. Thanks for reminding me.
At this point, I’d wonder if some of the older Microsoft Surfaces might be suitable for this purpose. Especially if it’s just displaying photos, you probably wouldn’t even need the Linux-Surface kernel for a lot of things and could just run mainline, avoiding a lot of misery. For instance, a 1st gen Surface Go from 2018 seems to run for ~$70 on eBay these days; I own one and used to daily-drive it on both Windows and Linux, and although there were some annoyances, the display is decent.
Though honestly, I wonder if you particularly need a Linux tablet at all. There are dedicated digital frame devices out there for displaying photos; a lot of them can just display off a USB drive or SD card in the ballpark of 50 bucks it looks like. I’d probably recommend not getting one that supports Wi-Fi, as I think it’s probably a stupid idea to assume some random cheap device you bought online has correctly-implemented network security.
Not great. I even got GPU passthrough working once, but you get weird graphics glitches because it’s all being sent over RDP.
I think Cassowary might be better than WinApps, but honestly, at this point, I just gave up on those and just use the VM directly.
To clarify, what I mean is WebKit continued while Blink became its own thing. Factually, Blink is not WebKit anymore.
Replace “WebKit” with Linux and Blink with ELKS.
Honestly had better luck with DOSBOX-X.
For one, it explicitly calls itself a “subset”; a subset is not the whole set.
If we don’t want to go just off the pedantics of language though, then here’s the thing: it was forked a very long time ago, and both have diverged significantly, I think. It’s a bit like saying Blink (the rendering engine of Chromium) is WebKit; sure, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but the two are very different now.
Technically not the Linux kernel.
Just because they existed during the Linux era doesn’t mean they ran Linux; Torvalds was writing for the 386 from the beginning, and Linux has never been written for anything below 32-bit.
Now, it certainly has RAN on that hardware through emulation, such as on a 4 bit Intel 4004, but only for the heck of it.
When it freeze, after you’ve rebooted it, try running sudo journalctl -p 5 -b -1; you might see something in those logs.
Maybe also open a task manager before you do anything graphics intensive, just to see if there’s a process that rapidly increases its memory usage; while it might not be the cause, I’ve experienced similar freezes when I use all my memory (on a machine with 32GB of RAM).
FYI Don’t use this command. I think it was intended as a joke, but I just want to clarify.
Fun fact: you didn’t have to reinstall; you can actually boot up a live usb and chroot into your install to fix things.
That is kind of awesome.
I wish Debian’s default Grub theme was less ugly; I know I could change it (and I have on other installs, but I’m quite lazy about theming these days. Part of it is I have a laptop that I rely on for college and don’t want to risk any theme glitches, so I keep its Debian install as vanilla as possible.
May I ask what your config was, such as distro, packaging format, and extensions were used? Also, what hardware?
Additionally, what issues specifically were you experiencing specifically? Were sites just loading slowly?
I ask because I’ve used recent versions Firefox on decently old hardware with 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores and had almost no problems. Everything rendered correctly and in a reasonable amount of time. I’d be curious to know why that isn’t happening for you.
Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.
Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.
As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.
If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.
If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.
Huh. I guess 3 years of Debian usage has just gotten me used to stuff like that.
I can see where one might go wrong; there’s a lot of sections in that guide with contingencies only meant for specific situations, like upgrading from a USB or optical disc.
May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).
Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.
Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.
Honestly, even those don’t run that horrid for me when I have to use them.
Did you restart the computer after the upgrade and before reinstalling third party repo packages?
The “half the programs not working” kind of sounds like you had packages compiled for a newer libc and the like but the newer libc wasn’t in memory yet because you hadn’t restarted.
I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.
Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.