Got this installed on all my work machines - if you’re wanting to stick a screenshot on Jira or Slack with a couple of arrows, wavy lines, or a bit blurred out then it’s dead quick and has just the functionality that you need. Yes, it’s simple and lacks a lot of ‘power tools’. Sometimes that’s just what you need, tho.

emerges from a brand you’ve probably never heard of

Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 / gen 3 as we speak. Great little laptop. I’d wanted something with a few more pixels than my previous machine, and there’s a massive jump from bog-standard 1080p to extremely expensive 4K screens. Three megapixel screen at a premium-but-not-insane price, compiles code like a champion, makes an extremely competent job of 3D gaming, came with Linux and runs it all perfectly.

“Tuxedo Linux”, which is their in-house distro, is Ubuntu + KDE Plasma. Seemed absolutely fine, although I replaced it with Arch btw since that’s more my style. Presumably they’re using Debian for the ARM support on this new one? This one runs pretty cold most of the time, but you definitely know that you’ve got a 54W processor in a very thin mobile device when you try eg. playing simulation games - it gets a bit warm on the knees. “Not x64” would be a deal-breaker for my work, but for most uses the added battery life would be more valuable than the inconvenience.

btw

Finest advice possible for any Linux sysadmin.

Yeah.

There’s a couple of ways of looking at it; general purpose computers generally implement ‘soft’ real time functionality. It’s usually a requirement for music and video production; if you want to keep to a steady 60fps, then you need to update the screen and the audio buffer absolutely every 16 ms. To achieve that, the AV thread runs at a higher priority than any other thread. The real-time scheduler doesn’t let a lower-priority thread run until every higher-priority thread is finished. Normally that means worse performance overall, and in some cases can softlock the system - if the AV thread gets stuck in a loop, your computer won’t even respond to keyboard input.

Soft real-time is appropriate for when no-one will die if a timeslot is missed. A video stutter won’t kill you. Hard real-time is for things like industrial control. If the anti-lock breaks in your car are meant to evaluate your wheels one hundred times a second, then taking 11 ms to evaluate that is a complete system failure, even if the answer is correct. Note that it doesn’t matter if it gets the right answer in 1 ms or 9 ms, as long as it never ever takes more than 10. Hard real-time performance does not mean good performance, it means predictable performance.

When we program up PLCs in industrial settings, for our ‘critical sections’, we’ll processor interrupts, so that we know our code will absolutely run in time. We use specialised languages as well - no loops, no recursion - that don’t let you do things that can’t be checked for an upper time bound. Lots of finite state machines! But when we’re done, we know that we’ve got code that won’t miss a time slot in the next twenty years of operation.

That does mean, ironically, that my old Amiga was a better music computer than my current desktop, despite being millions of times less powerful. OctaMED could take over the whole CPU whenever it liked. Whereas a modern desktop might always have to respond to a USB device or a hard drive, leading to a potential stutter at any time. Tiny probability, but not an acceptable one.

They’re bullshit generators, essentially - it doesn’t matter to them whether they generate something that’s ‘true’ or not, as long as it’s plausible. Depends what you intend to use them for - if you want a throw-away image for a powerpoint slide that will only be looked at once for a few seconds, they’re ideal. They generate shit code and boring, pointless stories, so couldn’t recommend them for that.

If you’re a D&D GM that’s in need of quite a lot of ‘disposable’ material, they’re alright. Image of a bad guy that you can then work into the story? Great. Names for every single Gnomish villager? Great. Creating intricate and interesting lore that brings your world alive? No, they are not actually intelligent and cannot do that - that’s the part that you provide.

At the moment, huge amounts of venture capitalist money is making these things much cheaper than their true cost. Can only imagine the price of them is going to go up a lot when that runs out. You might not be able to afford the subscription, but you’ll be in good company soon.

Think you’re understating it there. Network call takes milliseconds at best. Function call, if the CPU has correctly predicted the indirect branch, is basically free, but even if it hasn’t then you’re talking nanoseconds. It’s slower by millions of times.

I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?

But will that stop me from rebinding it as my ‘compose’ key? Normally I use AltGr for that, but more modifier keys are always welcome…

That’s because Arch is the best, so any additional comparisons are just wasting everyone’s time ;-)

Ah, that sounds a bit unfortunate. I’ve run AMD CPUs on Linux desktops with Bulldozer / Piledriver / Ryzen 7, my current laptop is a Ryzen 7 as well, never run into that at all. Hopefully the Arch wiki will sort you out. If not that, the third option would be ‘install Linux on an M-series Mac’ - don’t know how feasible it is at the moment, and paying the ‘Mac premium for hardware and software integration and then overwriting the software’ doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Not all of the light would have been wasted on the wall. If your wall is painted green, then the ‘rest of the rainbow’ (red, orange, yellow, blue, violet wavelengths) would be absorbed and converted into heat. Paint is quite rough on a microscopic level, and the green light reflected would be scattered in every direction.

Things that have a colour do so because they reflect those frequencies. Mirrors reflect pretty much all frequencies of visible light with very little scattering - that’s the definition of the word, really.

If you had a black feature wall behind your lamp, such that very little was reflected off it into the rest of the room, then with a mirror there would be about twice the photons illuminating the room. If your wall was pure brilliant white, much less of a difference. Your eyes don’t perceive ‘twice the photons’ as ‘twice as bright’ - they scale from absorbing thousands a second when fully dark-adjusted at night, to trillions per second at midday - but you might find it a bit easier to eg. read a book elsewhere in the room.

Light output from the lamp doesn’t change, but depending on the colours of things in your room, the light output that is useful for seeing might do.

Really? If it’s a big enough treatment works to warrant a SCADA, then I doubt an automation engineer with the experience to set it all up would be asking this question, but here goes. You’ve a couple of obstacles:

• every contract I’ve ever seen for industrial automation has either specified which control plane they want directly, or they’ll have a list of approved suppliers which you must use. Someone after you will have to maintain this. Those maintainers will only accept the things that they have been trained on. Those things are Windows PCs running Windows software. They will reject anything else. The people running network security on those machines will have a very short list of the acceptable operating systems for running SCADA systems. That list will be a couple of versions of Windows Server. They will also reject anything else.

• that’s not nearly enough information to make a recommendation. Which PLCs? Allen Bradley, Siemens, Mitsubishi, …? I can’t think of a job I’ve ever been on where the local HMI hasn’t matched the PLCs. The SCADA software almost invariably matches the PLCs used in the main motor control centre, with perhaps a couple of oddball PLCs for proprietary panels and such like. Could maybe ask the supplier if they’ve a Linux alternative? Siemens will laugh at you and Mitsi won’t understand the question, but AB just might.

Sorry - I’m a Linux evangelist, but I don’t think it’s a good fit for here. SCADA performance generally isn’t bad due to Windows Server - it’s fine, does what it’s intended to - but because eg. STEP 7 is an appallingly slow and bloated piece of software which would bring a mainframe to its knees. Which is bizarre - the over-the-wire protocol connecting the machines is generally a short binary blob described in the PLC configuration - these bits are the drive statuses, these bits are an int or a float for an instrument readout - and it shouldn’t be at all slow updating it all, but slow it is.

Nah, it’s repeating the installation process until you finally get enough stuff working to have internet, and then you can bootstrap installing every other bit of software that you need. Thank goodness for rolling release - I can’t imagine having to go through that again.

There are, but it’s complicated. Doom (2016) for instance - it doesn’t handle the very large Vulkan swap chain that’s possible on some modern graphics cards, crashes on start-up. Someone patched Proton around that time so that Doom would start; the patch was later reverted since it broke other games. Other games based off of that engine - couple of Wolfensteins, Doom Eternal - have the problem fixed in the binaries, and so run on up-to-date Proton, but depending on your hardware, only a few specific, old, versions of Proton, will do for Doom.

Regressions get fixed - that’s okay. Buggy behaviour which depended on regressions that got fixed - that’s a problem.

Humble guy, but that list of features that they’re working on is really impressive. Got a wee DragonFly Black USB audio thing that just never worked quite right with PulseAudio - install PipeWire instead, and it just does all its tricks. Great work team, keep it up.

I still have a Rage 128 hanging around as a ‘temporary head’ for installing headless servers. Many happy nights playing Thief: The Dark Project with it, and now it’s only good for rendering a TTY at a barely acceptable resolution. And soon, not even that. Goodbye, little e-waste :-(

That’s a fair comment. But on the other hand, if you are spending a fortune on a CPU the size of your hand (look at that thing in the article!) then there’s a good chance you’re using it for business purposes, and either you or your IT department will be very keen to have a completely vender-supported stack. Enthusiasts with fresh OS installs will not be representative of users of this tech - AMD haven’t really been targetting it at gamer desktops.

Of course, comparing both would be even better, see whether it is an HP crapware issue…

Well now. A few things, here:

• there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × … possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there’s at most 9 × 8 × 7 × … = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.

• we don’t care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there’s (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don’t need to store ‘the computer’s move’, just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let’s guess we need at most a quarter of that.

• we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn’t have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the ‘lay it out with tables’ style we had at the time.

Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing ‘new’ things, though, so it’s in their interest to pass it off?

I’d kind of hope that we’re not all like that - I use Arch btw. for my computers at home, but at work we use a combination of Redhat, Centos Stream and Amazon Linux, and I spend a lot of my day helping people with ‘Linux admin’ issues even though that’s not strictly my job.

When getting started with Linux, there’s a certain ‘glossary gap’ if you’ve come from Windows, not even knowing the right term to search for. Newstarts will complain that “waa! Linux is terrible, doesn’t recognise my hardware”, to which invoking a couple of udev commands seems like magic. Some people will get irritated when answering the same question in the same way for the tenth time and just post a link; really, those people need to step back and let someone else pick it up. The Arch wiki is fantastic, but it’s particularly fantastic if you already know what all the words mean and just need your memory prodding a bit. Having someone able to interpret a page for you is a huge benefit over having to fall down a wiki hole, which is very dispiriting when you’re trying to learn.

And yes, Arch is great for gaming - latest version of everything, look at my extra frames - but really, it’s only a tiny bit better than eg. Pop! OS, and that’s a much better choice for someone who’s never used Linux before.