I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

I find Firefox and derivatives are overwhelmingly preferred to Chromium and derivatives on older hardware.

Chrome has a history of disrespecting users' machines to make itself seem more performant.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

Buy the best you can for the amount you can afford and you won't feel bad about it. If you could only afford something really cheap and it dies in 2-3 years, you won't feel too bad about it and if you can afford something else, rinse and repeat. If not, try to get it fixed.

I'm not here to vehemently defend macOS, and ultimately it is just my opinion and personal experience, but I see a lot of "macOS isn't what it used to be" or complaints about some specific gripe. They do happen rarely, but I've used other OSes and don't see how they'd be more compelling. What's on the list for you?

Also should be illegal to lock me out of fan control, like Dell does. As always, never buy Dell, people. Teach 'em a lesson for advertising "space age cooling" that slowly cooks the laptop because their default fan profile was apparently designed by a pretty face in a Versace suit.

Yeah, maybe it should. I don't know how exactly that's typically implemented, hence the question mark.

> Don't forget, while the RAM can be prepared (zeroed) fast, the on-disk swap can't be prepared that fast (compared to RAM ofc), and you already under some memory and disk constraints (that's how you got to be using the swap in the first place) so adding another workload for cleaning up the swap is... not a good thing.

I doubt any of that would typically involve the OS specifically zeroing anything apart from just marking the corresponding parts of the swap space as free. And that's probably in the in-memory data structures keeping track of pages in swap. No need to zero any of the page contents, just mark those areas of swap as unallocated.

An OS might want to keep the pages around for the sake of having thrm still around but unless otherwise shown, I kind of doubt there's a great cost to the deallocation itself.

> If you have a small swap then you would be pressured to evict the data from it more often.

I get that if indeed the OS keeps pages available (and in the books) in swap after swapping them back into RAM, having a larger swap can reduce writes in case those same pages end up getting swapped back out again before they've been modified. It may be that's how it works.

I'm not sure I follow the logic if that's not the case. I don't understand why the OS would "evict" pages from swap just because swap is getting full -- there's nowhere to evict them to except RAM.

If you've got thing A currently in swap and you're needing to "evict" it to make space in the swap for thing B, that means you're wanting to get rid of B in RAM. That means you're already needing more space in RAM for some third thing C, so why would you solve that by swapping pages of thing A from swap into RAM?

My understanding is that swapping pages back in would be initiated by needing those pages back in RAM, so that's not really a case of eviction.

Anyway, since it doesn't seem like either of us knows for an actual fact how it works in any particular OS, I doubt speculation will lead to anything better.

I believe what you've seen as a phenomenon, I'm just not sure the explanation of that phenomenon makes quite enough sense to me.

> See above, no such thing as TRIM on an encrypted storage device.

TRIM may have security implications for encrypted drives, e.g. in terms of plausible deniability for forensics, that's true, and I didn't think of that. Though I'm not sure if that's what you meant.