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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#191

Post by nijave »

Waterluvian wrote: post #105
kevmo314 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they? My MacBook is much worse at multitasking. In fact the OS I've found to be best at multitasking is Debian/Ubuntu.

A decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users). Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds…

Imo Intel graphics work best (not sure about the new dedicated GPUs) if that's powerful enough for you. I've had some issues with amdgpu although no special setup is required. Unfortunately a lot of hardware manufacturers are Windows first (and only) and some poor volunteer has hacked up a Linux driver via reverse engineering

If you want a good Linux experience, you should look for hardware with first class Linux support. Likewise, good luck with macOS on non-Apple hardware--it's possible but ymmv

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#192

Post by ClumsyPilot »

spacechild1 wrote: post #58
WalterBright wrote: post #44

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…

For me the UI hangs whenever Thunderbird downloads new messages. It seems as if they are doing network I/O on the UI thread - which can't be true...

I stopped using thunderbird for this reason

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#193

Post by hutzlibu »

Waterluvian wrote: post #105
kevmo314 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they? My MacBook is much worse at multitasking. In fact the OS I've found to be best at multitasking is Debian/Ubuntu.

A decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users). Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds…

"Potemkin UI"

Thats a good description for many linux GUIs. They look like they can get the job done, but to really get the job done, you have to use what the developers of said UI likely themself use - the terminal.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#194

Post by BigJono »

akiselev wrote: post #63
einpoklum wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think I should consider making it a priority to code in a fairly low-level programming language (e.g. Rust) Maybe. Premature optimization is said to be the root of all evil... But at the same time - the assumption that everything will be easier and faster in Python rather than Rust or C++ is often invalid. Sure, for smaller scripts it almost always is like that, but once your app grows, this may stop being t…

> Maybe. Premature optimization is said to be the root of all evil... The full quote, because it always gets butchered to "premature optimization is the root of all evil": Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. W…

I think this quote is pretty funny in hindsight. Since it was said, we've had an entire generation of OOP muppets, and now a second one of modern web developers going that way, that add layers of pointless abstraction and complete bullshit on top of everything they write, just for fun.

In the 70s you might've needed a reason like optimisation to commit evil. These days apathy and cargo culting do it perfectly fine without optimisation even coming into the picture.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#195

Post by wruza »

faebi wrote: post #159
ufmace wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I make a full+incremental system disk backup periodically, e.g. once a quarter or two, or when I feel that a set of software that I'm going to install could do something bad, or after big changes which are undesirable to lose in case of failure. It doesn't save everything (important data is in git remotes anyway), but saves me from a reinstall-download-setup-reconfigure hassle. A user folder has a separate automatic and more frequent schedule.

That said, my home PC works since 2018 (buy date) and one at work since around 2016. Only used these backups once to move OS to a new SSD.

Most failures happen when you have no backups, so have at least one to make your system failsafe!

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#196

Post by jes5199 »

scapp wrote: post #162
int_19h wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Ctrl+Alt+Delete would be reliable enough to work with full-screen games. But, half the time, when you try to launch Task Manager that way to kill the offending process, it ends up under the game's output. I've learned to kill processes using keyboard navigation by looking at Task Manager's thumbnail in Alt-Tab process list, but it's ridiculous that we still need to do this kind of dance in 2023.

There's a way to make it always appear above other windows. Let me see if I can find that again... Ah, it's in the options menu on the task manager itself (alt + O to access the menu without a mouse).

why would you ever want that turned off??

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#197

Post by satiric »

andrewstuart wrote: post #108
Chinjut wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The registry is uniquely crap because it puts all the configuration for everything into some single store - I don't know what devilish format lies beneath it, then it stores everything as binary keys. Things are not separated strictly by application so you end up with a giant pile of intermingled goo. In Linux, no doubt there's alot to get your head around, but I've never found things to be a giant pile of spaghetti.…

The disfigured nature of the registry is a real shame, I actually like the idea of centralizing all configuration in Windows. I wonder if there was a better solution in Cairo.

To be honest (and I'm aware that I might be tarred and feathered for this) I kinda prefer the centralized Windows registry to the "random assortment of config files" approach that Linux has. I think both Windows and Linux give you that feeling of carefully crawling around in ventilation ducts once you get your hands dirty; I doubt it's possible to get rid of that without getting rid of the inherent flexibility that the systems provide. There's a reason Windows has both the registry and the Settings app.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#198

Post by kccqzy »

aaronmdjones wrote: post #184
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Applications that hang and can't be killed is a much bigger problem to me in Linux than in Windows 10. Have you seen anything in Linux that you can't kill with "kill -9"?

On Linux, processes that are stuck in D state (waiting on I/O) cannot be signaled. More specifically, the signal will be queued until the task exits that state. This includes signal 9. The process may well never exit that state, for example if the I/O it's waiting for is actually over a networked filesystem and the NIC is misbehaving.

Fortunately we have TASK_KILLABLE to replace TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE. https://lwn.net/Articles/288056/

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#199

Post by user_7832 »

phaedrus wrote: post #50
Baeocystin wrote: post #29

I hold out forlorn hope that someday my modern workstation will achieve the responsiveness and fast boot times of my Commodore 128. Not joking in the least.

I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the disk manufacturer had their firmware writers collaborate with low-level OS programmers to significantly speed up modern PC boot times. The conclusion was yes they could technically do it, but they found so many peripherals and device drivers that relied on the boo…

On a tangential note, that reminds me of my mom's former (Asus) laptop - it advertised booting up in 2 seconds, and actually was pretty close! I didn't think much beyond "must be a fast SSD with skipping the bios screen"... until while debugging some storage issues I realized it was an HDD XD

I guess when manufacturers want to do something well they really can integrate everything.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#200

Post by jes5199 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #143
stavros wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend getting a Framework. It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years, and if it doesn't, you can just change the CPU for a better one without having to throw all the other, perfectly good hardware away.

It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years I don't disagree with the other positive aspects of the Framework, but my goodness -- where are you getting this idea that a Mac lasts only two years? 6+ years is the norm for me on Macs.

my macs absolutely start to degrade after about 18 months, and I try to keep them limping along for a few more months. I think it’s usually the battery crapping out that causes everything else to sort of overheat and suck
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