sgtlion [any]

Honestly i never had a problem with Firefox RAM usage until ~5 years ago, not sure if i was just a weird use case or what

Tabmix Plus users rise up

I’m on Fedora - Nvidia drivers used to be an issue for me some years back, but since then it’s all automatic, I haven’t even thought about drivers since buying my 3060.

I’m quick to think this is an issue of bad educational standard mixed with confused terminology. Computer science is a very theoretical subject with very few directly practical applications. It’s like studying pure math and expecting to be a qualified engineer - you can technically do the numbers, but have no idea about the practicality.

I’ve never met a person with a computer science degree who was skilled at operating a computer, never mind practical coding. And I’ve met many. Most of them expected something very different from what they actually learned.

Installing dual boot over a default windows installation would be tricky, bordering on infeasible. Because you would need to shrink the windows partition live (which is not supported (and even if you could, requires free space and comes with meaningful risk of data loss)) and alter the UEFI boot entries, which is also very risky and engineered to be protected from unauthorised writes.

Even if you got around all those limitations, Windows can constantly erase your Linux boot entries (thanks Microsoft), making a dual boot-on-one disk setup basically unusable every month which needs to be fixed. So thanks to this Windows behavior, this setup won’t work on many systems.

So you’ll pretty much only ever be able to install to another disk. And the portion of non-tech savvy users with a spare, unused disk is going to be effectively nonexistent.

Don’t get me wrong, an install-from-windows feature would be nice, but I don’t think it could feasibly overcome any meaningful barriers.

It’s the Linux kernel. Android is inarguably a variation of Linux.

Linux definitively does dominate the end user market. You just mean the end user desktop/laptop market.

I agree though that preinstallation is the biggest deal. The fact that people have to install Linux at all is the problem. The installer itself is already 100x better than the Windows one, but that’s not enough.

Not to mention it means manufacturers ensure all the hardware is compatible, drivers etc are installed and working, which is why windows users feel it works better.

Same issue though. If manufacturers actually had linux preinstalled, they would ensure compatibility. This isn’t a windows/Linux problem, this is a manufacturer/default os problem.

I am amazed by what you say though. I’ve had 0 hardware problems installing Linux on many different machines in the past 5 years. All the incompatibility issues of old are gone by my perspective

In terms of contributed code, obviously yeah. But there’s a lot more work involved in development than just that, plus all the basically necessary addons.

I never really understood why mozilla insists on being a corporate entity in the first place. Tons of (if not most?) it’s development comes from volunteers already. Just scale down to doing basic development moderation and rely on donations / collaborate with other open source orgs.

Mozilla is the most profit-oriented non-profit org I’ve seen.

Waiting for seeders is definitely a thing, I once waited 8 months for a seeder to show up (and they did!)

For sure, and it’s a chill question. Unlike the other comment, I totally celebrate your fucking about with settings you don’t understand, it’s great. I’ve practically made a career of it myself :D

This is normal. This is a topic with a lot of complexities if you drill down into the details and history, but the tl;dr is certain system processes and other programs will preferably write data to swap because it’s so infrequently needed, and avoids massive slowdown if swap is needed, eg RAM filling, hibernation.

If you’re absolutely sure you’ll never exceed 32gb of RAM usage, you can turn the swap off. But you’re unlikely to notice a performance boost, Linux does (largely) know what it’s doing, moreso than you or I.

The TankieTanuki link is a good place to start to learn more if you really want to tweak it.

I would look at BIOS secyre boot/boot mode options. And depending on the age of the PC whether it supports UEFI but or you need a legacy boot.

Yes. May need to turn off secure boot too.

Are they installed on separate drives? Depending on the exact setup, Linux and windows both generally support legacy as a boot method, so you may be able to just BIOS to select a boot drive.

Paradox games! Stellaris, Victoria 3, CK3, HOI4, etc. They just make the effort with all their games and it’s great

I tend to have ~10,000 tabs because I obsessively fail to clean up. But it never takes much memory or cpu, my PC isn’t amazing yet Firefox is always lightning quick.

I’ve never used the discard or merge windows features though, I can see why those might cause issues. I assume these two functions just aren’t optimised for so many tabs.

One addon I might recommend to help keep numbers down is Duplicate Tab Closer, which has options to specify how similar tabs can be to be considered duplicates, and also will detect across all open windows if desired.

Honestly, IRC was a very functional, easy, free, low-resource and privacy friendly chat protocol and I don’t really see why it got left behind. If you wanted image/ file support that could really be implemented client and/or server side.

You can’t trust any of it to be totally secure, it’s effectively impossible. But, this is true of all software, at least open source is being audited and scrutinised all the time (as demonstrated).

All you can do is follow best practices.