I’ve heard social media where you interact with strangers instead of “friends” referred to as “antisocial media”.

I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 early on because it was on GOG. If you’re gonna release a AAA game DRM free on GOG when new I’m gonna support that.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a non-indie game soon after release. Maybe AOE2? I normally do the 5 year delay thing.

It may be both a factor of who you live with (the ones itching to get back to the office either lived alone or with people they didn’t really gel with), and could have also been the length of time we were in lockdown (we had one of the strongest in the world - for the first 6 weeks or so even McDonald’s wasn’t allowed to open). After a couple of months of not being allowed to leave the house and having no face to face contact with friends or family, I can understand the desire to get back to the office. The people I have in mind mostly lived close to the office, too.

One other factor may have been that our remote working infrastructure was in no way ready for the entire organisation to work from home with a couple of day’s notice. Video calls were just not possible for the first stretch as the work computers were all VPNed through a potato.

This was also my experience during the main sweep of the pandemic. It was so great getting to cut the commute and be home. Something I have luckily managed to largely continue. Prior to the pandemic my kid was in daycare pretty much 7:30-5:30 so it was really nice to not have to do that, plus during our lockdown we used to go for a family walk at lunchtime.

While some of the single guys I worked with hated staying home and were straight back in the office the moment they were allowed.

Interestingly, I love the Gnome workflow and could never get into KDE. I tried a KDE distro for a while but it was after I’d tried Gnome and it just didn’t click for me.

Many of these things are down to the distro. So which one did you go with?

I didn’t see you mention anywhere what you picked. Seems like Fedora or something Fedora based?

Haha I just searched up this person using Google Drive as swap 😯

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/rrb7gk/you_cant_download_more_r/

I traced this back to a particular rogue website. But yeah I think GNOME uses more RAM anyway, then having everything containerised in Bazzite is extra RAM I’m sure. Then having like 5 chat apps, Steam Firefox, etc open was easily eating up my 16GB RAM. Of course more RAM means more is used because unused RAM is wasted RAM, so it’s hard to judge one system against another.

That sounds like a performant way to run a system!

Possibly related? https://github.com/canonical/checkbox/issues/727

GNOME being killed by oom-killer in Ubuntu. I guess for some reason GNOME was killed for me instead of Firefox? Even though I’m on Bazzite.

I know my wife had some computer in her family earlier than we did in mine, it had a black and green screen (as in the screen only showed those colours). Not sure what it was, but it must have been the 80s I’d guess.

Looking through the wikipedia page for the Apply II I’m pretty sure one of the variations is what we had at school that I was referring to. I find it really hard to remember back that far, though!

I used Windows through to when I got a Mac for a while and used OSX (it was during the intel CPU period and I dual booted Windows). I had tested out various Linux distros over the years and always had a live linux CD just in case I needed to rescue a computer, but didn’t use it as a daily driver until I got my current laptop about 3 years ago. I switched from Windows to Linux cold turkey, no dual boot. I figured most things are in the browser these days anyway. The only thing I’ve never solved is that my scanner will scan at 1200DPI in Windows but never more than 300DPI in Linux. I have drivers downloaded from the Brother website but it doesn’t help 🙁. So I have to use my wife’s Windows laptop if I want to scan photos.

It’s hovering more like 1.7GB right now, with 1GB shared RAM (I don’t really get what that is in regards to the 1.7GB in use).

I’m also running Bazzite, a gamer-focused linux distro, but it is special. It’s an atomic distro, meaning instead of the traditional way of updates where the update program installs each of hundreds of components, in an atomic distro you get the whole update as a block. All files except the user space are read only, and so almost any application you install will instead be a containerised flatpak because otherwise it might get overwritten by an update (you can still install things the old way, sort of, but it’s heavily discouraged and a last resort.

Steam also has a *.deb for Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu or Mint in addition to actual Debian). A native application probably uses less RAM than a containerised version, I’m guessing.

Don’t let my weird system put you off. Linux is a fun adventure! For me, jumping around different distributions from time to time is part of the fun 🙂

Ah so cached is the disk cache and it sounds like this is not part of the “used” memory.

It sure does. I’ve never cracked 30GB RAM before. The site is doing something weird, for sure. Though I feel like Firefox should catch this before the OS crashes.

Looks good, thanks!

The RAM use kept growing until it locked up and I got booted back to the login screen, losing everything unsaved. Now it’s back to normal but when I run free -m the numbers match what’s in the GUI.

I’m pretty sure the culprit was a website for uploading photos for printing. Something odd about it, I did upload 1,000 photos at about 2GB total, but it was sucking up RAM Like crazy. Firefox was using some fifty-something GB of RAM.

So if we say Firefox is using 4GB which seems pretty normal, then add on normal background apps Element, Beeper, Signal, Caprine, each using 1GB with no window open for some reason. Steam uses 2GB just to run in the background. The only window open is Firefox and I’m already at 10GB without counting what the system needs.

I normally also have Joplin open, there’s another 1GB. And Nextcloud in the background + Betterbird for email, together another 1GB.

Now if I want to actually do something, I might open a JetBrains IDE like PHPStorm which if I open 2 windows with 2 different projects could easily take 4GB.

No VMs. The RAM usage kept climbing until I was crashed out to the login screen and lost everything that was open. It seemed to be a particular website that gobbled RAM.

Weird. If I was going to saturate my GPU, I’d pick an intensive game. Seems odd that a gaming laptop might get overwhelmed and shut off if a game is too intensive? Or is is something special about LLMs that make it the Archilles’ heel?

I don’t remember those days. I used Windows 3.1 (with DOS for games) at a relatives house, but it was too early for me to understand about the hardware. We also had some Apple computers at school with I think 5 1/4" floppy disks but again I didn’t really get technically savvy until I was older.

The first PC we had at home was Windows 95. I seem to recall we had a pretty decent amount of RAM. Maybe 32MB or perhaps even 64MB.