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Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

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Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#21
post #12
post #10

What was the stated reason?

57:50 of the video. In effect, disillusion with Apple's direction.

In case anyone wants to know if he clarified on why Raspbian in particular: he did not.

Raspberry Pi hardware would be the obvious constraint. Though, that only pushes the question one step further: Why a Raspberry Pi hardware? I... don't know. If you went from Apple devices, it seems like a non-sequitur. There are much, much better options, unless on an extremely limited budget.

But, I also don't know his use case. Does he have a gazillion of them for some (I assume interesting) reason?

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the pi 4 you can boot off a USB3 drive like a SSD. I setup a 4gb memory model with SSD boot and it's a flawless little desktop--it runs full gnome and Ubuntu just fine. If you can get a 8gb memory model it would be perfect. I love it.

You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-w... >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec

And? For desktop use it doesn't matter. If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. I'm not sitting here running disk benchmarks all day... I'm browsing some web pages and using a text editor.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#23
It's also worthy to note that shortly after that part of the video, he notes (from another question) that he has over 50 Raspberry Pis (including 12 stacks of 4xPi4s). So his choice of Raspberry Pi Linux is likely the result of that.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#24
post #6

Raspbian* apparently. That's really interesting; even the highest tier Raspberry Pi still feels pretty sluggish as a desktop thanks to the limitations of SD card throughput/latency/queue depth/etc. I wonder what his usage looks like.

Runs on PCs so he's got options if he needs more power.

I see "Raspberry PI Desktop for PC and Mac", but it's 32 bit.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#25
post #4

"8GB ought to be enough for anybody" , I guess? Also, he said "Raspbian", rather than the "Raspberry Linux" in the title...which I don't think is a thing.

  rpi-imager - Raspberry Pi imaging utility
That tool gets you the option to install the image of your choosing.

8GB can be exhuasted, use a System Load Viewer dock widget and btop to spot/stop/start the process over-consuming your memory. Typically, the web browser hogs up to 1GB then I quit it. The next upgrade is to 16GB or 32GB from 8GB for me. I went from the Mac Mini at 8GB to Rpi 4GB then 8GB.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-w... >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec

And? For desktop use it doesn't matter. If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. I'm not sitting here running disk benchmarks all day... I'm browsing some web pages and using a text editor.

Hope you never want to do updates or reconfigure any packages or change up any docker containers, etc.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-w... >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec

And? For desktop use it doesn't matter. If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice. I'm not sitting here running disk benchmarks all day... I'm browsing some web pages and using a text editor.

> If you're not paging out of ram you will never ever notice.

What you say is true but you didn't respond to someone complaining about ram latencies, you responded to someone lamenting poor disk access perf. And you recommended booting off SSD which is demonstrably specious advice.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the pi 4 you can boot off a USB3 drive like a SSD. I setup a 4gb memory model with SSD boot and it's a flawless little desktop--it runs full gnome and Ubuntu just fine. If you can get a 8gb memory model it would be perfect. I love it.

You literally lost perf by moving to ssd through USB https://alexellisuk.medium.com/upgrade-your-raspberry-pi-4-w... >Interestingly, the SD card gave a seemingly better buffered disk read than the M2 SATA SSD at 43.35 MB/sec

this is a good point, despite its being downvoted. ty - you saved me a future debug session

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#30
For those who might prefer text over video:

  Q: What's your operating system of choice, today?

  A: I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run Apple. Right now, recently, meaning within the last five years, I’ve become more and more and more depressed and [Laughter] what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious, but they are taking a lot of space and time to do it so it’s ok. [Laughter] And I have come within the last month or two to say even though I’ve invested a zillion years in Apple, I’m throwing it away and I’m going to Linux -- to Raspbian in particular. [Applause]. Anyway, I'm half transitioned now.
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