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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]

#71
post #56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires lots of manual control but from my experience I can match or exceed battery life in comparison to running windows, with some tweaking. Out of the box it was terrible as well.

What did you adjust?

It's not that simple.

Two of my last five laptops were macs, three linux boxes, if you consider corporate laptops as "mine". One of the three linux laptops just worked beautifully (wrt. battery and other driver issues), one didn't at all, and one worked poorly until I installed some software that shouldn't matter for battery lifetime, and since then it's had excellent battery management. There was a long list of dependencies, so I suspect that the software I installed depended on a package that solved whatever the problem was.

You may chance to buy hardware where someone really has tested and fixed linux. Or you may get something else.

FYI: The two good ones are some Huawei thing that weighs 1.3kg and a GPD P2 Max, a tiny toy, really portable, https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax

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

#72
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.

Your can run DietPi[0], which is a minimal image based on Raspbian, on an x86_64 PC if you want

[0]: https://dietpi.com/

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

#73
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you adjust?

This is for the Framework laptop and not a System76 machine, but going through this lets my laptop last an entire day doing Android dev. https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...

Similar experience over here on one of the earlier 11th gen models and recently on a new 12th gen model as well (build quality feels a lot improved vs the early stuff too, fyi). People are still right to call BS on having to run any of this to get decent battery performance but it is possible to get if you jump through a few hoops. Next step for distros should really be sane defaults for this stuff and/or an option to tell the installer it's going on a laptop/non workstation desktop so that it gets sane defaults for the laptop based on efficiency per watt rather then the sane defaults for a server/workstation (max performance).

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

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit, I tried and failed to switch away from Apple. I bought a Linux Laptop - an System 76. I was surprised at how terrible the battery management of linux was compared with my mac. And that particular issue broke me.

I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in the last few years.

Raw battery life aside, I think one big advantage macOS still has is that its power management isn't modal. There is a low power mode like iOS if you really want to eek out as much runtime as possible, but I've never once hit a need to use it.

Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on battery, you get full performance when you need it, and high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose a power/performance profile feels incredibly archaic to me, though I appreciate that some folks may want that level of manual control.

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

#75

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 d…

"..what Apple is doing to something which should allow you to work is just atrocious.."

Anyone know what his specific issues are?

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Again I will tell you--it doesn't matter to me and I suspect 99% of users. Unless you are like a Linus tech tips fanatic and eeking out every percent of performance for your Good Gaming Rig then it's fine. Yes the storage performance isn't perfect. It's fine.

[deleted]

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

#77
I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years.

I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama.

He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the whole thing. Touch screens, voice activation and so on. Hardware and software and data hoarding project.

He said he has massive cabinets of CDs, all the music he ripped and tested audio encoders with his own ears.

Ken is 80, and still building cool side projects and scratching his own itch! That's the story.

Be like Ken by building something cool, not by using whatever OS.

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

#78
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I will tell you--it doesn't matter to me and I suspect 99% of users. Unless you are like a Linus tech tips fanatic and eeking out every percent of performance for your Good Gaming Rig then it's fine. Yes the storage performance isn't perfect. It's fine.

I couldn’t stream YouTube videos on 1080p without terrible stutters when I tried the Pi4 a few years ago. Has that been fixed?

4K might cause some problems in my experience, but 1080p should be totally fine.

(in my memory the problem was more with running the display itself in 4k and trying to get a full frame rate out of it, but I think the advice still holds - 1080p videos on a 1080p or 2K display shouldn't be any sort of major challenge)

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

#79

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 d…

I feel the same way, but I know that moving to Linux isn't for me. My approach has been to run a Hackintosh, which provides excellent compatibility, reliability and parts availability, and resist upgrading macOS at every major update. I'm currently still on 10.14 and haven't been forced off it yet, and maybe never will. Generally, if something requires a more recent version, I just reject it. There tends to be a positive correlation between the quality of software and the age of minimum OS requirements anyway.

An interesting thing to note is that even with software that states support for an older version of the OS, it usually is more buggy, so there is a tendency for software to degrade over time as it gets updated.

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

#80
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.

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.

An Intel NUC is not much more than the top tier Raspberry Pi, once you get a case and stuff it needs, but is orders of magnitude faster. I got one and installed Linux Mint on it. It's a much, much better system than the Raspberry Pi 4 I have.
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