10^24 is a lot bigger than 6×10^23
Well yeah it’s almost double, but I wrote the comment as a mental estimation of the order of magnitude, so it doesn’t change the substance of the discussion.
I mean at the beginning I arbitrarily picked a number in that 10^40 to 10^44 range and that’s a factor of 1:10,000 rather than 1:2, lol.
If you don’t limit it to valid positions/arrangements it’s like 10^120. Closer to the “number of X in the observable universe” caliber of number.
This was a fun one to look up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
It looks like the number of valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 10^40 to 10^44, and the number of atoms in the Earth is around 10^50. Yeah the latter is bigger, but the former is still absolutely huge.
Let’s assume we have a magically amazing diamond-based solid state storage system that can represent the state of a chess square by storing it in a single carbon atom. The entire board is stored in a lattice of just 64 atoms. To estimate, let’s say the total number of carbon atoms to store everything is 10^42.
Using Avogadro’s number, we know that 6.022x10^23 atoms of carbon will weigh about 12 grams. For round numbers again, let’s say it’s just 10^24 atoms gives you 10 grams.
That gives 10^42 / 10^24 = 10^18 quantities of 10 grams. So 10^19 grams or 10^16 kg. That is like the mass of 100 Mount Everests just in the storage medium that can store multiple bits per atom! That SSD would be the size of a small large moon!
I’d love to hear your specific thoughts on that one.
My comment was less about anything technical with SteamOS, and more about its popularity and the influence of gaming on the enthusiast PC market. And I’m not assuming that everybody will install SteamOS on their desktop, just thinking that arch-based distros might get a lot more market share.
I haven’t even used it, honestly. Like I said I’m using mint on everything.
I think it makes some sense once you take a look at the big picture. Mint has been around for a very long time and has become one of the most popular distributions on its own. On top of that, it is designed to be an easy turnkey system for inexperienced linux users.
That alone would gain it plenty of recommendations, but ubuntu would probably still be the top recommendation. However, the same thing that made it good — Canonical and its resources — is also the thing that drove away the Linux enthusiasts that recommend distros to new users.
So you take Ubuntu, the user friendly distro built on one of the sorta OG distros (debian), strip out the proprietary stuff that annoys the Linux community (snaps etc), and make it even more user friendly while removing none of the Linux goodness, and there you have Mint as the obvious recommendation.
Hell, I’m a computer person and I happily use Mint on multiple computers daily.
Going directly from modern Windows to the Cinnamon desktop in Mint was a distinct improvement!
the average computer user does not even want to think about their operating system. 90%+ of people who use a computer want it to turn on and just work for the things they want to do
I’m the more typical Lemmy user that DOES think about their operating system and will happily fiddle-fuck with it on occasion. And I still use and love Mint because even in 90%+ of the cases when I use the computer it is to do something WITH the computer and not do something TO the computer.
The “it just works” factor is very high with it.
Until you realize that the current distro isn’t the worst like the others were.
That’s when you know you’ve found home.
It even goes beyond that because if you just search how to do something in linux, you are almost guaranteed to find instructions that work on whatever random site you find. It’s pretty rare to find instructions for dnf or pacman without also having the APT instructions right there.
Games run great in Linux Mint.
Mint also has a GUI driver manager that makes it really easy to see and change which nvidia driver you’re using.
I freaking love Linux Mint. I use it for myself because despite being the “easy” distro, it is still Linux. (Or as I like to call it, GNU plus Linux, lol) But you are still allowed to use the terminal, compile your own code, fiddle with your system, run docker, and generally do what you want with your computer without it bogging down to load ads for services that are already running in the background bogging it down more whether you pay for it or not. And since it is based on debian/ubuntu/apt, users benefit from that popularity when they look up how to do something.
I love it just as much for the non-power users. It is how I will allow my parents to keep their perfectly good laptop that collects dust instead of spending a thousand bucks on a new win11 laptop to collect dust.
Long term I assume that I will end up on Arch or a derivative, mostly thanks to Valve, on top of it being a good project to learn on.
The wrong one, obviously!
its only been tested and approved as an anti-parasitic for humans via oral ingestion
Ooh, I get to do an ACKSHUALLY here. They do have it for topical treatments too, like for rosacea.
Eh, they didn’t exactly paint it in a good light. It’s more like not laughing too much at the ordinary NK citizen’s big brother plight while the rest of us are being monitored constantly and much more real time.
The two situations are not the same, but the parallels show his we all deal with this crap in our own ways.
Yeah I guess I left that part out! It’s funny because like so many things in Linux, you have all the power but you often don’t need to use it because the same problems just aren’t there.
You get to decide when to apply the updates, but they are so quick and unobtrusive that I choose to apply them immediately!
Seriously. If you’re used to fiddling with Windows and especially if you have installed Windows recently, go try something like Linux Mint. Just the install process will blow your mind. And then wait until you get a system update and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing!
“jellyfin took too many resources scanning my library”
That’s a strange one to me. In my experience Jellyfin scans my libraries in about 1/10 the time Plex used to take on the same machine.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it!
Is it good with gapless playback? It isn’t as crucial for me as for some people who listen to live recordings etc, but it’s always nice to have and is a good sign for the quality of the player.
I’ve had a lifetime plex pass for several years. Once I tried Jellyfin a few months ago it was all over. My “I’ll run both just in case” period lasted a week or two.
The downside is that Jellyfin will take more setup on your end, especially if you want to let other people connect securely to your server.
The upside is performance and responsiveness. Once I started using it I decided Plex had to go, even if I have to drive to each family member’s house to fix their shit. It was like moving between Linux and Windows, as far as one being designed to work and the other being designed to satisfy dozens of corporate KPIs.
Fortunately the setup for the end user is just as simple once your server is good to go. They just need URL, login, and password.
And since it’s all open source, there’s some fun diversity in clients. I use Finamp specifically for music, and there are audiobook focused ones.
I was thinking of 10^16kg diamond storage inside a larger SSD that’s the size of a large moon, similar to how a real SSD has data stored in tiny little slivers of silicon inside a much much larger device.
I should have explained that one better. It’s easy to imply such details to keep text shorter.