The trick is to disable automatic updates once you have a working system. Yes, there is some risk. But at least your system will stay as stable as it was when you first installed it. Oh, and disable swap and have plenty of RAM.
32GB + swap off really does help for sure. I do have updates disabled but I admit I am sloppy with not picking through what I update. It doesn’t help that there’s new updates basically daily.
Keep an eye on 'snap' it tends to do nasty stuff without telling you.
I’m curious as to the upside of C, is it mostly just a familiarity thing? Holding your own code to a high standard is great, but wouldn’t it be nicer if you could offload more of that into the tooling and spend more time on the problem or making the code even cleaner? Also as a side note: I always find it funny that a flag that represents all warnings doesn’t actually turn on all warnings.
For my own projects I use C because I know it, but also because I know and trust the ecosystem. I seem to have developed something of a software-survivalist mentality, so I like to know that I can build my project five years from now without worrying about whether some remotely-hosted dependency isn't there any more. (I'm not claiming that newer, more trendy languages necessarily fail this test - just that I don't kn…
Out of curiosity, when you considered the compilers to use for your CPU project, did you look at pcc? And if so, how would you say vbcc compares, in terms of ease of porting to a new arch?
I use Thunderbird for my email. Its behavior shows it is a multithreaded program. But often, the mouse and keyboard will freeze and it becomes unresponsive for several seconds. This is indicative of suboptimal partitioning of the tasks into threads. The highest priority thread should be responding to user input. Heck, back in the 1970s, I designed and built a single board computer that was to be a glass tty. There wa…
I can crash Linux(all tested distros >5 for at leat 3 years) and FreeBSD reliable with Thunderbird, it's a terrible application and a statement for GUI-oss-applications....pure shame....
For my own projects I use C because I know it, but also because I know and trust the ecosystem. I seem to have developed something of a software-survivalist mentality, so I like to know that I can build my project five years from now without worrying about whether some remotely-hosted dependency isn't there any more. (I'm not claiming that newer, more trendy languages necessarily fail this test - just that I don't kn…
I think the remotely hosted dependency problem and ecosystem thing is not that big of a deal all the time, but if the project involves atypical OS and architectures, then C makes sense. I think it’s still possible to do these in other languages, but that’s just another familiarity gap to add to the existing set. For the remotely hosted dependency thing, I think it’s pretty easy to vendor dependencies in most realisti…
> The ecosystem thing can be a bigger deal, but again it really depends on the problem domain.
Yes, absolutely - and of course C isn't immune to ecosystem problems, either. I remember the pain of working with GNU autotools back in the mid 2000s - in fact it's probably that experience (plus trying to use bleeding-edge tools written in Python!) that left me so cautious about external dependencies today.
Mouse cursors are mostly handled in hardware. GPUs composit the cursor during scanout, so all the OS has to do is calculate the new coordinates of the cursor and tell the GPU about them.
> Mouse cursors are mostly handled in hardware. GPUs composit the cursor during scanout, so all the OS has to do is calculate the new coordinates of the cursor and tell the GPU about them. Is this true on modern Linux DEs (e.g. on KDE Plasma)? Is it also true on Windows and macOS?
I don't know about other platforms, but in Windows, it had been true >20 years ago, before the desktop was even composited. Some fullscreen games also relied on this functionality, and sometimes you had an option in game settings to switch between hardware-accelerated cursor and manually drawn one (because the former could be buggy with some video drivers).
I believe the mouse cursor is still often a hardware sprite today.
Almost 100% guaranteed, but it is still possible for the OS to be delayed in sending it the coordinates. Of course that means that the OS is badly written.
I can say for sure this is true on sway (wayland) because while messing around seeing if the proprietary nvidia driver finally works yet (when will I learn... for anyone curious nvidia is still nvidia) one of the things I had to do was manually disable hardware cursors.
This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad. Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows. Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever. Also,…
Don't MacOS and Unixes have the equivalent of registry hell with a million configuration files hidden away in /etc/ or /usr/ or wherever, and then having to check where environment variables are set and so on? Ideally, almost all of a program's configuration settings would be stored in the same folder as the program, readily discoverable, and you could just pick these things up and move them easily, but in practice,…
From a typical user’s perspective, macOS puts all Preferences files into ~/Library/Application Support/ or ~/Library/Preferences/, and they are standard Plist files readable by both command line and GUI tools that ship with the system, so easily editable and human-readable. From a power-user’s perspective, it is a Unix system and that part of it is the usual mess of Unix config files. I’m definitely a power user but rarely have any need to touch a Unix config file on my macOS systems.
This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad. Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows. Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever. Also,…
Anecdotally, that's not my experience with Windows these days at all. I've never had the whole system freeze up on my Win10 desktop. Never noticed a slowdown or app that can't be killed, and never done a reformat or rebuild. Windows Update is mildly annoying when it decides to reboot your system for you, though usually when you're not using it. The registry seems fine to me too. Okay it's not perfect, but I don't thi…
My windows literally doesn‘t boot today due to a bluescreen. No idea why or how that happened. Had it a few times in life before, but never on macos.
Anecdotally, that's not my experience with Windows these days at all. I've never had the whole system freeze up on my Win10 desktop. Never noticed a slowdown or app that can't be killed, and never done a reformat or rebuild. Windows Update is mildly annoying when it decides to reboot your system for you, though usually when you're not using it. The registry seems fine to me too. Okay it's not perfect, but I don't thi…
I agree. Windows is basically fine these days. It's even better than Mac and Linux in a big way from a desktop stability point of view because it has the Ctrl-alt-delete interface which works reliably and lets you kill the offending program. Linux has various useless options like sysreq shortcuts that you can't remember and kill random processes, and I don't think Mac has anything, though to be honest I don't recall…
In my experience, on macOS the Cmd-Opt-Esc force quit dialog works pretty well most of the time. Of course `killall "Foo"` in the terminal works nicely too.