I don’t think you need 32GB of RAM. 16GB should be enough, and 8 will still do for light tasks (though modern apps and websites are starting to push that, which is terrible). Your OS uses any RAM you don’t use to cache files, which speeds up your system, reduces power consumption, and could save you some SSD wear by caching the writes.
If you haven’t already, you can mount a tmpfs over your browsers’ cache directories (a bunch of them in ~/.cache or ~/. config). It used to really speed up browsing back in the HDD days. I doubt it’s still necessary, but hey you’ve got plenty of RAM, right?
If you really don’t do anything but browsing, you could boot your entire OS into RAM and have a 0 SSD latency browsing experience.
You could also use the RAM to run a bunch of VMs or containers. I used to run a separate Pihole VM, for example; virtual machines are nice and isolated, so you don’t risk ruining your /etc directory with a billion different configured services. The big downside of running such stuff on your machine is that you quickly end up with a whole bunch of duplicates (I have like four versions of postgres running on a server somewhere because I’m lazy) but if you have RAM to spare, that doesn’t matter.
One container that may be worth looking at is Waydroid (or Anbox if you’re on X11) to run Android apps on your desktop. I find that a bunch of different services have web interfaces thst just don’t work as well as their apps, and running those can be nice. How much of a difference this makes will depend on the services you use, of course.
Lastly: don’t underestimate the advantages of plenty of RAM when programming. It’ll depend on what language you use, but many compilers will generate a million tiny files that will all be written to disk and read back. SSDs are fast, but random reads are still nowhere close to RAM speed. Your OS will hide most of this overhead, but I definitely felt the difference going from 16GB to 32GB because of file system caching alone.
I know I’m part of the minority in liking the Gnome 3+ designs, but with so many people lamenting the death of GTK+2, why don’t they fork the toolkit? It’s not as if you’ll break any compatibility by backporting fixes and extending the classic UI components.
Perhaps you’ll need to rename your project (except for the system libraries) to avoid trademark issues, but if all the developers came together, I’m sure you could write a drop-in replacement for the old GTK+2 libraries. Such a project may have some difficult tasks ahead of it (bringing Wayland support and fractional scaling, for example) but they can copy Gnome’s homework, they don’t need to invent everything from scratch.
I second that, install cockpit if you don’t want to bother with the CLI and run a couple of VMs. You can even start 3 VMs and install Kubernetes on them and play with it.
Most excellent. I’m glad to see things are working out, and that you’ve found something that works well. I hope your experience is as beautiful as mine was - mine pushed me to pursue computer science and programming.
I recommend at this point learning Flatpak and exploring Flathub for your favorite apps. Flatpak is treated as a first-class citizen on Fedora, so its my go-to recommendation. Should be super easy. Here are the instructions: flathub.org/setup/Fedora
Run a live version, and see if everything works. Generally speaking, the TBs aren’t made for consumer Linux. Even Windows kind of works with it, but the drivers are spotty. Search for a CF-33 with Linux from factory, and install that version, if that even exists. The TBs are laptops for a very specific use-case, and support for them on the consumer market is lacking. Good luck, though!
Edit: quick search found this for CF-33 but is not Ubuntu specifically, and this specifically for CF-31 but it may still be helpful.
Will do. Yeah, when I got it I did a fresh install of Win 10 Pro and did a driver download from the Panasonic site and still had issues getting the sierra wireless card, gps, and rear camera working. Yeah, it’s been a bit of a journey for my use case. I deploy into pretty austere environments for work and it’s been hard to both hardware (laptops, tablets, cell phones) that are extremely rugged durable and can run open source. Thank you for the help.
I’ve done antiX on the CF-30, but the touchscreen wasn’t working. I didn’t really use it in the first place, but it was still a bummer. To be fair, the touchscreen barely worked on its original WinXP with OEM drivers built specifically for it. Good luck! I really hope you get all the needed hardware running!
Success!! Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installed and running. Surprisingly most of the drivers are working, including the touch screen digitizer (about as well as the Win10 pro which is eh. Like you, I don’t really use the touchscreen too much) thanks again!
Nice!!! I’m so glad you got all the important hardware working! I have a CF-54 (I think) that I got from a random auction with Win10. I never tried to install Linux on it, because of the failure of the CF-30 at work, but in light of your success, I may just give it a go.
“I’m not saying gnome is bad here”… but it lacks basic DE features, pushed useless crap like the activity view to people and slow animations that can’t be completely turned off. To top things they try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).
All for a “design and usability view” that doesn’t amount to anything productive.
Do not misunderstand me. I don’t generally use a lot of desktop icons. For the most part, the fewer icons are on my desktop the better, but I do have a few.
But back when Ubuntu briefly got rid of them, it sucked because occasionally I do want some icons on my desktop.
In short: if you don’t wanna use any, you don’t have to; just gimme the damn option.
That’s what they did initially. Unfortunately, keeping around an antiquated optional feature that no developer wants to work on isn’t free. It ends up being a hurdle for improving other stuff and at the same time it doesn’t work as well as the user would expect. There is more context here if you’re interested.
Clarification: In my previous comment I meant that the implementation was antiquated, which is why it was causing many problems.
Although I do think that desktop icons in general are outdated because they’re designed around a desktop metaphor that is itself outdated. Our use of computers has changed vastly over time and the original metaphors are irrelevant to today’s newcomers. Yet most desktop environments are still replicating the same 30 year old ideas. It’s because we’re used to them (which I understand is a valid reason), not because they are necessarily the most pleasant or the most efficient.
That’s fair. Like I said, I mostly don’t use them. But if I really need to remember something in the short term, I’ll put it on the desktop. Or if I don’t really have any other place to put it I’ll put it there.
My point is that it’s useful to have when you need it, even if you don’t normally use it. Although I suppose it wouldn’t be difficult necessarily to find a new workflow. Still, to most everyday people I imagine desktop icons are kind of a non-issue.
I have opened in a tab that article you sent me. If keeping such an otherwise minor feature available is such a problem for future development for developers, I will have to read that. Because it otherwise seems almost inconsequentially small a detail when compared to the OS / file system experience as a whole.
Gnome is extremely productive, the workflow is amazing, much better than the Win95 workflow that everyone else uses, IMO.
Don’t really see how it’s changing every 2-3 years. Gnome 3 was well over a decade ago and not much has changed since. I don’t see why you felt the need to lie about that?
Yes because constant flashy animations that get between you and the task is the definition of “extremely productive”. The same goes for themes made with CSS and other web technologies and their absolute top notch performance. “Extremely productivity” is clicking a button and getting the window/panel/icon or whatever in front of you before your brain can even register the event, not a 2 second fade in followed by another equally excruciating fade-out animation.
What are these extremely flashy animations you speak of? I think you’re just making stuff up. I’ve never seen any of these long animations. I click on an app icon and it opens immediately. I click close and it closes immediately.
Gnome is extremely productive. It’s a big part of why most Linux workstations use it. It’s stable, keyboard-focused, gets out of my way, and has the best workspaces/virtual desktop implementation I’ve come across. I use it for my work. Getting my work done the Windows way is so cumbersome in comparison.
You gonna provide a source on your “completely reinventing the wheel every 2-3 years” claim, or will your next comment contain another new lie?
Use XFCE for a day and then come back here and talk about performance. Not that I like XFCE’s crude approach to thing but it is indeed fast and BS free.
So your proof of Gnome “reinventing the wheel every 2-3 years” is them removing desktop icons (good riddance btw), idk, 7 years ago or something? And activities view (amazing for productivity and I wish others would catch up to Gnome here) well over a decade ago?
Yes. I will need examples. Because those aren’t examples of what you said - show me how using Gnome is night and day different to 2-3 years ago, and show me how using it then was night and day different to 4-6 years ago.
pushed useless crap like the activity view to people
This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.
slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.
Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?
They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).
Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?
It wasn’t part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.
Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.
they try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years
GNOME 3 was released 12 years ago, and hasn't changed that much (unless you consider horizontal virtual workspaces are a major paradigm shift somehow).
Just use something else if you don't like it; no one's "pushing" anything on to you. Clearly, other people do like it.
horizontal virtual workspaces are a major paradigm shift somehow
Yes. I also consider the removal of desktop icons, the default change to going into the activity view and whatnot important shifts and attempts at reinventing things.
No experience with the CF-33, but I did use a CF-30 and as far as I could tell, outside the WiFi (back when drivers for that were a problem) everything on it worked out of the box, never had any accessories that plugged into the more proprietary connectors but everything I ever plugged in worked, including RS-232
Do want to add, on the CF-30 when I replaced the WiFi card with a newer Intel card I had to shave off the power control mini pcie pin so that the BIOS whitelist couldnt deactivate it, no clue if they still whitelist WiFi cards in newer models or the CF-33.
Will check, this one is running an Intel Dual Band AC-8260. I won’t need to use WiFi too often (this is the laptop I bring with me on work deployments, no internet and if I run the Starlink I can put it in Ethernet mode). Thank you for your help.
As of right now my I/Os are working. WiFi, mobile (gps unknown right now) but the card readers, hdmi ports etc are functioning. Forward camera works but rear still doesn’t (couldn’t get it working on win10 either, not a deal breaker) even the ambient light sensor. Any advice on getting Wine setup (I’m trying to run the Panasonic day/night to utility for a night vision/red screen mode, the only FOSS alternatives I’ve found have just been blue light blockers)?
As you mentioned Ubuntu’s Night light, f.lux, and Redshift all work more like a color temperature adjust than like a red only mode, I found some people mentioning if you are running X you can use xcalib to set the color channels individually, but couldnt find a tool for it, not entirely sure wine would make that function work correctly but it is worth a shot, as for wine, if the version in the package manager isnt new enough there is also a PPA for Ubuntu for more recent wine versions, but I havent used those in a long time and cant strongly advise them, YMMV in installing them and keeping the system working long term, but I was always the sort with too many PPAs so I switched to arch to not deal with that.
“just browse the internet” doesn’t indicate that you don’t need a powerful computer in 2023. Modern browsers are really heavy - and rendering websites are much more complex now.
Unless you’re really frugal about your PC budget, I think it’s definitely “to-go” for 32G
Run different virtual machines for different purposes. For example, you can have a VM that does all its networking over a VPN and downloads torrents in the background while you do other things. Or you can run other OSs in VMs.
Also, containerized software is everywhere now and it uses more resources. Extra memory helps.
LSPs, linters, AI auto complete, multiple ranked auto complete sources, contextual syntax highlighting abused to feed things like symbol tree views, type analysis, scoped file trees depending on what you’re working on, infinite undo since last commit, and all available in real-time.
I feel like I use up 8GB the moment I type “neovim” on a sufficiently large node project, lol.
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