That's really interesting, thanks. Probably explains some of the weirdass trace routing I've observed on older boards, sometimes going the long way around.

Back a few years I was wondering why Mint, being glorified Ubuntu, ran so much better than Ubuntu. Turns out Mint was running (by actual count) 1/4th as many processes. Gee, I wonder how that could impact performance...

I didn't much like Devuan until they borrowed the PCLOS desktop and general way of doing things... now it's a lot slicker.

348 square feet per person.

To power all of India, 20,000 square miles (if I didn't slip a digit).

If any of we peons proposed such mass environmental destruction, even of the middle of nothing and nowhere, we'd be jailed.

Yeah, same here, first crawled into a PC's innards in 1993, and nowadays I have a houseful built from salvage and scrap, but none of it started life low-class. Absolutely right, Windows problems are rarely Windows, but rather shit hardware or shit drivers. Absent that, I'm accustomed to Windows uptimes measured in years. (Linux, well, I find it also depends on the distro.)

Even so... we who build our own desktops are a small minority. The real market isn't even home PCs, it's business contracts where they buy 'em literally by the pallet, or the truckload. Or why there are a zillion Dells on the salvage market.

The more-space argument doesn't wash. They reclaimed a whole lot of space going from HDD to SSD to NVMe to eMMC. I have a 14" thin laptop whose working innards entirely fit on what amounts to a Pi board (it's about 4" by 6", and not cramped). Even counting it as a minimal unit, that's a lot of space left to work with.

Tho I can see the no-one-upgrades argument; that's almost all PCs everywhere. We DIY types who promptly max out RAM are an anomaly, a tiny sliver of the market.

Of course, they use that to say, "Base unit, $AttractivePrice. Unit with enough RAM to function as you need, add 3x the aftermarket price for that RAM."

Funny thing, Montana is a big grain-producing state, and we have possibly the most unpredictable, and definitely the most absurdly-variable climate in North America.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmontanakids.com%2Ffacts_...

Oh, and we also grow potatoes, but only in very limited areas (potatoes need more predictable conditions), whereas grain is grown here pretty much anywhere the ground is near enough to level.

I don't know about real Macs, but I have a Hackintosh that's ... um, OSX 10.8, on a midrange i7 with 8GB RAM and a fast SSD, and even doing nothing much (file manager, system settings and the like, no browser) it was sluggish to occasionally painful. Gave the system 32GB and suddenly it was much better.

If a version of OSX however-many-years-old is that bad with 8GB, I can't imagine current-OSX being pleasant.

What I've noticed more than that... over the past year or so, a vast uptick in the number of auto-generated videos. These drag together a lot of readily-available text and images on the nominal topic, so pass for "real" -- but the giveaway is that the narrator is text-to-speech, not a human. (It'll make mistakes like saying "one, six hundred" for "1,600".)

All such channels I've encountered have MILLIONS of subscribers, MILLIONS of rapidly-acquired views, but very few comments. (Like, 12M views in a week, but only 30 comments.)

I've concluded that these videos exist so that the channel owner can use another bot to generate millions of views and a whole lot of the shared ad revenue.

Which is probably starting to bleed Youtube beyond what they're used to.

And yes, probably because of the high view counts, those channels occasionally dominate my recommends (which are otherwise pretty good).

Remembering that in the business world, "unsupported" can translate to "legally liable" in the event something goes seriously wrong.