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.
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.
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 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. 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 got mine from Morgan's. They shipped to Czechia. https://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/c/599/Laptop-Sale/ Tier 1 are also good. https://www.tier1online.com/ 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. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org