When I saw the Monaspace family linked in a HN frontpage some time ago, I installed the whole family, and now my terminal font is Monaspace Neon. I also type my LaTeX code in Monaspace Argon. They won me over Iosevka.
I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day.
Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.
Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.
This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.
Those sellers never disappeared; although I'm from not from Paraguay, the situation is familiar. These days they're selling desktops built on 10+ year old Xeons which you can buy for dirt cheap on AliExpress, installed on frankenstein motherboards from noname Chinese manufacturers which are desktop-oriented, but take server processors. The graphics card is something old like RX480, and comes from being run into the ground by years of crypto"currency" mining, then resoldered on a new board, also often developed by Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.
Graphics cards especially are very unreliable and frequently die within a few months of purchase. But when you can buy a whole PC for the price of one modern videocard, many don't have a choice.
The notion that GPU chips can be "run into the ground" by years of crypto mining or AI workloads has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now. The hardware is quite resilient, it doesn't really fail at a higher rate.
I bought a XFX RX 580 that was used for cryptomining from eBay, used it for 3 years then handed it down to my son who used it for 2 more. It still worked when he removed it. Can confirm.
I used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service.
Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go.
GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.
Also any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".
I think the problem is the distinction here between chips and boards. The entire GPU assembly can absolutely be worn down from continuous use, thermal pads, paste, VRMs, fans do degrade. The chip itself may be fine but it's very rare to find anyone willing to transplant a GPU from one board to another.
Well, a lot of people here would have loved to have 10-year old Xeons in their motherboards; while power hungry, I guess they would make good CPUs since they have good cache sizes. But no, there's no Xeons in our offers here. What people get here now are Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs, or N-class CPUs, with the onboard GPU only, 4GB RAM and 1 TB HDD running unlicensed Windows with understandable results. But when you are a digitally illiterate parent seeking to purchase a first PC for your children of school age, this looks attractive enough at a good price point.
Don't look at the branding. Look at the core type, count, and speed (maybe).
It's been a while since I shopped Intel, but they used to typically release a low core count/lower clock speed Pentium/Celeron on the mainstream cores, often with no hyperthreading. These were typically low cost and could be a good value, you'd get decent single core performance because it's the newest architecture and multicore performance would be iffy but you can't have everything.
> N-class CPUs
These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time. Usually twice the cores, but much less performance per clock. Never feels fast for interactive work. But they make sense for some situations. Some of these get an n3 branding to trick people looking for i3s.
> These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time.
They may not be ideal for desktops, but they are great low power home server CPUs. In fact, they are much better than ARM alternatives like Raspberry Pis for the money.
I indeed remember too the family of K6 chips and their Super Socket 7 motherboards. They were cheap and affordable, and allowed cpu upgrades to classical Socket 7 motherboards.
The peak of the Super Socket 7 performance CPUs was reached when AMD released the + versions of those chips, the K6-2+ and K6-3+. Those were initially designed for laptops with lower powerconsumption and some enhanced instruction set. But they quickly became common in typical overclockers setup.
I got myself a K6-3+ that I was able to overclock to around 600MHz, probably on an ASUS motherboard.
Back then AMD was fighting so much to get marketshare that you could order for free all types of merchandising from AMD like posters, stickers and CPU badges, and they would even ship it for free from US to Europe. I remember always bringing some to hacker meetings.
I happen to have one of those 600MHz chips on my bench currently! It's a K6-2+ that has had the remaining 128KB cache unlocked, making it a K6-3+. It is indeed a speedy chip, performing somewhere above a Pentium II-450 according to Speedsys.
Do you recall how long you used the platform or your next upgrade choice? :)
K6 was great at everything other than FP. Unfortunately for AMD, a year before its launch ID released Quake, for which the primary metric of performance was basically "how fast are you at FP". And Quake very rapidly became the common benchmark against which CPU performance was measured.
> the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background.
You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.
>but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
Yeah... no. If you're dealing with changing systems, you'll need continued support from maintainers. And there's a lot of stuff out there in the business world that is commonly used and breaks all the time. Stuff will break. If not, it is not getting updated. In that case I'd be more worried about security than compatibility.
Yeah... yes. There are systems which are continuously maintained but don't break all the time. Yes, stuff will break but this is way less common in Linux.
Claws-mail has all my email for over 15 years. My inbox is several gigabytes in size, which claws handles flawlessly. And the software is continuously maintained. I'm using version 4.4.0 now, which was released 16 days ago on March 9.
Turns out email clients are quite simple (mostly because the protocol is ancient) and also something everyone in every company uses. But many OSS clients still die eventually. And once you get into the actual business application world, you're in for a world of pain on Linux. Especially if you go near AD/Azure/Entra. Heck, the fact there is not even a stable name for this mess of a software suite tells you enough. And yet every big company relies on it.
The not so good parts are 1) it is written in Rust and therefore packaging is awful with a lot of dependencies; 2) it repeats playlists by default with no option (so far) to turn that off. But there's an issue open on it and it looks like this is going to be fixed.
I read the title and thought it was odd that the MAUI project "is coming to Linux", because I had it in mind the KDE project with that name, https://mauikit.org/. Looks like what is announced in the article is something different.
The Bruderhof movement also comes from a Hutterist heritage and has several communities in the US and the world, including a historically significant community in Asunción, Paraguay (Villa Primavera)
Religious freedom is one of the claims to fame that my country has.
One of the oldest ideas in Western statecraft is that you can't have a country with religious diversity. So when a town became protestant all the catholics had to leave and vice versa.
But in the Netherlands the leaders devised a sort of "diversity is strength" policy tolerating all kinds of weirdos as long as they paid taxes and didn't disturb the peace. This is how Jews ended up in Amsterdam.
However the real crazies who did not want to function in society ended up in America.
I think a factor in Optane's demise was dishonesty on the part of low-end laptop manufacturers.
You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS.
That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.
I never bought one because I only saw Optane in these low spec configurations. I didn't see any use for a tiny SSD. I only learned more about it after it was discontinued.
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