This will be nice, if it makes it to market.

That article is an excellent resource, BTW, thank you. However, it nowhere says anything about swapping being used when you have more memory than you use.

1TB of memory is not a lot, for many applications, so just saying “this guy has 1TB memory and look what he thinks of swap” doesn’t mean much. If he’s processing LLMs or really any non-trivial DB (read: any business DB), then that memory is being used.

Having space in memory so that you never have to swap is always better than needing to swap, and nothing in Chris’ article says anything counter to that. What he mainly argues is that swap is better than OOM killers, having configurations that lead to memory contention in the first place, or seeking alternative strategies to turning off swap.

The fact is, I could turn on swap, but it would never get used because I’m not doing anything that requires heavy memory use. Even running KDE and several Java and Electron apps, I wouldn’t run out of physical memory. I’ll run into CPU constraints long before I run into memory contention issues.

Frankly, if my system allowed me to have, say, 40GB instead of 64, I’d have done that. I only want to not have to use swap - because never using swap is always preferable to needing it - and slightly more than 32GB is where I happen to land. But I can only have symmetric memory modules, and all memory comes in powers-of-2 sizes, and 64GB is affordable.

Again, Chris’ essay says only that swap is better than many alternatives people seek; not that swap is better than being able to not exhaust physical RAM.

As a final point, the other type of swapping is between types of physical memory - between L1 and L2, and between cache and main memory. That’s not what Chris is talking about, nor what the swappiness tuning the OP article is discussing. Those are the swapping between memory and persistent storage.

Yup! And it’s glorious.

It’s far better to have too much, than too little.

Don’t get me wrong; I love this. This is fantastic. However, I have only one thing to say: mhwahahahahahhaa!

The last time I upgraded my desktop computer, I said “F it” and maxed out the RAM and put 64GB in it. It’s an AMD with integrated GPU that immediately takes over 2GB RAM – and I still have yet to do anything that has caused it to drop below 50% free memory. It’s exhilarating.

TBF, I spent years on a more memory-constrained laptop and my workflow became centered around minimalism: tiling WM, no DE, mostly terminal clients for everything but the web. When I got the new computer, with wild abandon I tried all the gluttons: KDE, Gnome… you know, all of them. The eye candy just wasn’t worth the PITA of the mousie-ness of them, and I eventually went back to Herbstluftwm and my shells. Now, when I do run greedy apps - usually some Electron crap - what bugs me is the constant CPU suck even at idle, so I find a shell alternative.

I guess it’s an irony that I live in a land of memory plenty and never need more than half what I have available. But I still get a little thrill when I do notice my memory use and I’ve got 70% free. Makes me want to code up a little program with an intentional memory plenty leak, just for fun, y’know?

The artist has an Elektra Microcasa A Leva.

If you find it, post it!

It’s not really an inconvenience for me; I set it up, let it brew overnight; easy-peasy.

It’s a great backup to have, that’s for sure. I drink mostly cold brew, but sometimes I run out and there are a few days before I brew more. Aeropress is a fantastic way to brew a quick cup.

I’ve read it’s the undercoat. Short hairs have an undercoat, and it sheds a lot. Longhairs don’t (or don’t have as much a one?) and so don’t shed as much.

I don’t care; I’d take a bullet for any of them.

Yeah, this one’s a lap cat too. I’ve loved all our cats, but it’s great when they’re snugglers. Tissot has a thing, though, that we say for him: “Both hands! No devices!” When he’s on you, he wants your full attention. It can make getting things done difficult, but it’s probably healthy that he forces us to take breaks from our computers.

Does Zoey shed much? We adopted Tissot when he was 5, and I expected him to create a nightmare for the vacuums, but strangely he doesn’t really shed much, for all the long hair he has. Loves to be brushed, but we never get anything off him! Is Zoey the same way?

Wireguard really changed the landscape, for me, and my entire approach to networking. Suddenly, VPNs became fast and easy, and where previously impractical for casual (hobbyist) admins, it made creating enterprise-grade secure subnets easy. It’s astonishingly stable and reliable, such that my initial concerns about cutting off all access except through the VPN - once a truly nerve-wracking concept - is now a no-brainer. It’s made my network administration easier and more secure. My firewalls are simpler.

Wireguard is one of the biggest high-impact, low-visibility networking game changers I’ve seen in decades.

He says thank you, and you’re pretty, too.

I love Zoey.

But do not tell my boys. One would probably love Zoey, too - he’s a cat’s cat, and a white-ish version of Zoey - but the other is fantastically jealous.

Friendly, pretty, outgoing, and wants to be involved in anything anyone is doing:

I set up a wireguard VPN network between my computers and servers, and then firewalled off all services except Wireguard, and a few services on one server. That one server is my weak point, but even it has sshd firewalled off except through the Wireguard subnet.

It’s stupidly easy to set up WG subnetworks. I’m not a networking guy, and it was trivial for me to do. If u can run an ssh server, you can set up a Wireguard subnet: just do it.

I’m with you; I prefer date versioning for many things. Semver does work really well for things with exposed APIs; it’s a stretch to justify using them with user tools, and especially GUI tools. Semver is used to great effect in Go - which is how it should be use: mainly by the language’s module management system. Outside of that, it’s human readable, but like XML, its main value is to machines, and only secondarily to humans.

Calendar versioning is far more human-oriented, and so more useful for things without exposed APIs or module tooling.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

In Mint? That’s good to know, thanks. As long as it’s fairly reliable; I don’t want to be trying to remotely debug a computer that won’t boot because of a middle-of-the-night update.

Yeah, especially boomers, which is what my dad is. My generation will be a little more demanding; millenials are the first “computer” generation, who grew up with them. Gen Z had computers since they were infants. That’s going to be interesting.

Yes, but:

• he never upgrades anything. He’s not computer savvy; that computer hasn’t been updated in years. IME, the longer the time between upgrades, the more chance of breakage. This way, he got an up-to-date install.
• the drive sizes are different, and I wasn’t about to try to walk him through resizing a partition and filesystem over the phone
• there was very little he needed to keep from the old computer. He didn’t install software; it’s a web browser terminal
• it wouldn’t have helped the biggest problem we had, which was getting into a BIOS I didn’t know and couldn’t see, and changing it to boot from the USB stick. We’d have had to do that to do an image replication either way

So, I had an experience recently that has changed how I think about this topic.

A few years ago, I gave my dad a laptop that I wasn’t using anymore. It wasn’t that old; I’d just gotten a newer one. I do not have Windows; never have, never will, so the laptop had Arch (probably) on it, which was going to be too much for dad, so I wiped it and put Linux Mint on it.

I got the occasional call from dad; he got a new (to him, probably used) printer and didn’t know how to set it up, but mostly he just used it and didn’t seen to have any problem with it.

OK, so about a month ago, he calls and says he broke the laptop and the keyboard didn’t work; a while back, with help from a church friend, he’d replaced the battery, but had missed a screw, had hot-glued something and gotten glue in one of the USB ports… I didn’t even want to know what all he’d done, but dad’s from a jerry-rig generation. Anyway, he’d missed a screw or something, and something was rattling around on there and one day the keyboard stopped responding.

So dad goes out and buys a refurbished laptop, and calls me and asks what he needs to do to migrate over. The laptop came with a fresh Windows install - 10, or 11; I don’t know. So I tell him, I can help him get any data off the old computer, but he needs to decide whether he wants to switch to Windows; now’s his chance.

Dad’s 80. He barely grasps computer concepts - hardware, he’ll mess around with, but software… for example, that version of Mint uses the same background for the session manager as the desktop, by default, and so he thinks they’re the same thing - it’s just sometimes it makes him log in. So given a choice to go Windows, he says he wants to stay with Linux because that’s what he’s familiar with. I’d like to point it here that he often forgets the name “Linux”; he just knows it isn’t Windows.

Deep breath - we’re a 4-hour flight apart - we get a USB keyboard hooked up to the old laptop, he orders a USB stick from Amazon, and we download the latest Mint iso; the next day when the USB stick arrives I walk him through burning the image; booting the new laptop into the BIOS; changing the boot order; and eventually, booting into the Linux Mint install image. We get connected to the WiFi no problem, open the installer from the desktop icon, and then have some debate about dual boot. He says he’s probably never going to use Windows, and dual boot makes things a little more iffy, so he picks the easy route and just wipes the drive and installs Mint.

The install process goes smoothly; he asked the occasional question about, e.g. the keyboard layout question, but mostly we chat while he watches the progress bar. We’re doing this over the phone, no video conference, so I’m mostly just listening to him describe what he’s doing and answering questions like, “it’s asking me for a name for the computer - what should i put in?” That’s done, we reboot, change the BIOS setting back (could have just left that one), reboot again with the USB stick out - and he’s back in Mint.

I send him some instructions over email about setting up a Firefox sync account, getting prepped for a Wireguard install (because, if I’m doing family tech support, I wasn’t to be able to remote log in over VPN), that sort of stuff. Things he can do download or manage without me, to prep for the next stage.

OK, some weeks go by without me hearing from him, and he calls yesterday for help with “completing the migration.” And here’s where I start to change my view on this. I find that he’s followed the instructions for Sync and that all his browser stuff successfully came over. That’s 90% of what he’s wants. I start what I think it’s the final configuration steps: setting up the printer, and he says, we don’t need to, it’s been working since we did the install. He must have configured it himself at some point. We unzip his old /home, I show him the software manager and how he can find and install stuff, we get Zoom installed and make sure the webcam, mic, and speakers work… and I decide to not fuss with getting a VPN into his laptop because everything is just working.

My 80 y/o dad bought some random-ass refurbished laptop, and aside from helping him burn the iso and get the new laptop to boot from it… I did nothing. I mean, I provided some guidance for his username, the laptop name, setting the time zone during install; but aside from the iso burning and some trouble we had even getting to the BIOS and then figuring out the right boot sequence, he could have done this all himself. All of the hardware worked; he either added the printer himself and forgot, or Mint did it for him. I was certain we’d have trouble with the WiFi chip (may you be sent to the hell of being boiled alive, Broadcom), or the printer, or… something. But no. It all Just Worked™.

Seriously. Except that the BIOS boot order makes things extremely challenging for newbies, and burning boot images onto a USB stick isn’t trivial (in retrospect, I should have just told him to buy an install stick from Mint; sorry, Mint), Linux has just worked. For a guy who isn’t clear on the difference between Firefox and the OS.

I think it was the WiFi chip and the printer that caused my mental shift; these have been the traditional pain points. Maybe we got lucky. But I think the real reason is that some Linux distros have just gotten really good for novices.

Dammit! Stop making it better!