On 12/12/2018 13.51, Liam Proven wrote:
On 12/12/2018 13:29, Carlos E. R. wrote:
This does not help us desktop users, but sadly, desktop Linux is a tiny minority niche and will never be anything else. :-(
:-(
Well, yes, agreed.
But this is how and why Apple and Microsoft make money. They put a huge amount of R&D effort into desktop OSes.
The Linux companies don't, because Linux desktops don't. Servers do, so we have some not-very-well tested, barely-integrated desktops on top of a server OS.
Ubuntu used to put more effort into desktop integration than almost anyone -- SUSE is a server vendor, RH is a server vendor, and there basically isn't anyone else.
All the pure-play desktop Linux vendors (Corel, Caldera, Xandros, Lindows/Linspire, Mandriva) are dead.
Sadly, there's a reason.
ChromeOS is about it, and part of the reason it works is that it's so massively cut-down compared to a normal desktop OS.
But that's not it.
See: I work for some time with the machine, doing things happily with that workload.
I leave it alone for an hour or a night. The screen saver kicks in (black). I go back, touch a key, no response.
What happened?
It's thrashing. I think we've established that.
That's the symptom, not the cause.
How can the computer be trashing with the same programs that were working an hour before, but when I stop using it, it crashes, the program or the kernel goes mad?
Probably because something is leaking memory.
The numbers do not add up.
Or get more RAM. :-(
it is a laptop, that's impossible, AFAIK :-(
What I did was get faster swap. SSD.
So get a newer laptop.
I did! It also has 4 GB of RAM. It is smaller and lighter, I can travel with it, not heavy. And it does not exhibit these symptoms (so far: I'll test for it. But I have been using it a lot recently). I simply did not find something else at a reasonable price and small footprint. Yet at the time I did not know about this problem.
I had a lovely big Toshiba Satellite Pro P300A, but it has an old chipset so it takes DDR2 and while upgrading it from 3 GB to 4GB was about £5, going from 4 GB to 8 GB would be about £80.
I will have to study it. It is a "compaq presario CQ61-330SS". <https://www.kingstonmemoryshop.co.uk/laptop/hp-compaq/presario-cq-series/hp-compaq-presario-cq61-330ss-laptop> Says it can be maxed to 8 GiB. I must consider it, then. I think I would need two 4 GiB modules. I think the price is 79.99£ each. Hum...
So earlier this year, I sold it to a friend, for about £100. I kept its SSD.
And I replaced it with the Thinkpad X220 I bought last year for £150.
The Satellite was my testbed machine, after I replaced it with a 2nd-hand Mac mini.
Now, the X200 that the X220 replaced is my testbed box. (Currently it runs IBM PC DOS 7.1, Bluebottle/A2 and Haiku, with Devuan for experimenting with VMs etc. I have failed to get eComStation to install.)
Second-hand laptops are pretty cheap. Thinkpads are tough, so 2nd hand Thinkpads are a good deal. They are also well-tested with Linux, and everything usually Just Works™.
I don't know how to buy second hand laptops here (Spain, not the capital city). There was a shop, it disappeared.
I got mine from Morgan's. They shipped to Czechia.
Remote purchase? Hum. I don't like that. But I'll take a note.
Tier 1 are also good.
I am sure there are similar vendors in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Latin America, I don't know -- but there's eBay and so on.
I don't like eBay... -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.3 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)