The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[SchizoDaemon]

I notice that a lot of younger and/or dumber computer owners decide that they need the biggest computer with the biggest graphics card and the biggest power supply so that they can draw the most current playing the newest wokeslop video games.

Most games, even new ones, will run on relatively old hardware. My machine is getting on for 7 years old now. A good PSU will save your computer.

The reason I have a tower of power is because I need to run the AWS stack on my machine for work. A Dell Precision with an Ultra 7 processor and 32 GB of RAM (which is my backup machine) will struggle with the tech stack we run.

Folks with experience who have looked at old motherboards in PCs like this know that the combination of the heat and the current literally cooks the board. It’s a visible phenomenon. Fans and water cooling don’t really help matters.

My CPU and GPU get to 50C. I have 2 fans at the front and one at the back, and everything else is normal, cooler stuff. Every PC motherboard in the last 20 years (about 3 PCs) I've owned is the best kit I could afford.

There is no way an ambient temperature in the case of 50C will cook the board.

Here is the top secret advice TPTB don’t want you to know when it comes to running a stable computer:
You want a mini PC, not a big chongus tower. You want a MacBook Air, not an unholy gaming laptop. Not only will your electric bills go down, but you’ll be amazed that you can go 5-10 years without replacing your computer.

My PC has run almost 24/7 for the last 7 years. It has never crashed. The reason I don't have problems is because I don't buy crap in the first place.

Mini PCs will keep all the heat in the case and get much hotter than a bigger tower. It got so hot it bent the little mini-ITX motherboard inside, and sometimes the RAM doesn't register properly.

A MacBook Air will be made obsolete when Apple decides to stop updating the OS, and you are better off getting a refurb ThinkPad, which will be supported by some greybeard Linux distro until it gets too slow to be useful.

 

[Curry Teafag]

I notice that a lot of younger and/or dumber computer owners decide that they need the biggest computer with the biggest graphics card and the biggest power supply so that they can draw the most current playing the newest wokeslop video games.

Sure, you cannot do that with a random mini PC.

You want a mini PC, not a big chongus tower. You want a MacBook Air, not an unholy gaming laptop. Not only will your electric bills go down, but you’ll be amazed that you can go 5-10 years without replacing your computer.

Even for surfing the Web, you need a GPU that supports current standards. With a desktop PC, you just throw in a new one, and can continue watching JewTube—thanks to PCIe's up- and downwards compatibility.

I recently did that with an AMD Fusion system I built in 2011, where I threw in a 10-yo GTX 1070, which supports VP9 decoding. The mini-ITX mobo only has one PCIe slot, but it runs the 1070 just fine. With a laptop, you are typically limited to whatever it supported when it was new. Even a RAM and SSD upgrade won't help you if your system cannot decode a video properly.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

Even a RAM and SSD upgrade won't help you if your system cannot decode a video properly.

My Dell 6410's iGPU is such garbage that YouTube is at 15FPS at 720p if there are any transparency effects on the page. I've had to use custom CSS on YouTube to make it playable.

 

[babaisyou]

Dell 6410's iGPU is such garbage that YouTube is at 15FPS at 720p

That iGPU is so old that both Firefox and Chrome (recently) don't even use it for rendering, falling back to software rendering instead. You'd be much better off using yt-dlp and a media player like mpv.

 

[Curry Teafag]

My Dell 6410's iGPU is such garbage that YouTube is at 15FPS at 720p if there are any transparency effects on the page. I've had to use custom CSS on YouTube to make it playable.

I used to watch YT on Win 10 without issues on my Futro S740 (Celeron J4105 with UHD Graphics 600—2017 tech) when I bought it NOS in 2021, but recently couldn't anymore, no matter which OS I tried. Something has made YT run slower over time on certain GPUs—the iGPU in the thin client seems to be such one. The thin client is basically rendered useless for desktop use due to that. The GPU is 4K-capable, mind you, with two DP 1.2 outputs.

OTOH, my much older Skylake laptop's HD Graphics 530 runs KDE at 4K and YT at up to 1440p60 just fine—same as it ever was. I currently use it for Proxmox, so not much desktop use, but still.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

That iGPU is so old that both Firefox and Chrome (recently) don't even use it for rendering, falling back to software rendering instead. You'd be much better off using yt-dlp and a media player like mpv.

It works well enough to play YouTube in the Kitchen and I use it to browse manuals while working on my Land Rover.

Something has made YT run slower over time on certain GPUs—the iGPU in the thin client seems to be such one. The thin client is basically rendered useless for desktop use due to that. The GPU is 4K-capable, mind you, with two DP 1.2 outputs.

For older iGPUs it is ambient mode and, IIRC, video codec.

 

[Curry Teafag]

For older iGPUs it is ambient mode and, IIRC, video codec.

The thing is, it's not that old. It is newer than the one in the laptop, which is 2014 tech.

BTW, Software rendering is also crap on that system because of how slow its 10W CPU is. The Skylake Core i7 is four times faster.

 

[Paul Revere Pantry Raider]

My Dell 6410's iGPU is such garbage that YouTube is at 15FPS at 720p if there are any transparency effects on the page. I've had to use custom CSS on YouTube to make it playable.

That iGPU is so old that both Firefox and Chrome (recently) don't even use it for rendering, falling back to software rendering instead. You'd be much better off using yt-dlp and a media player like mpv.

That's the single reason I retired my E6520. I loved that machine. 15 years. Just got too damn slow to YouTubes and do anything else.

 

[jeff7989]

Apart from the fact that a car has hundreds of moving mechanical parts, and a PC doesn’t, your analogy is great.

It’s amazing how the folks who buy the low-end chips (what used to be called Intel Core i3, etc) because their primary concern is a silent PC accidentally discover the secret to a PC that lasts forever.

Again, I realize what I’m saying sounds stupid if you don’t have the required experience. A better analogy would be “I spent so much time and effort trying to be a good husband to my various wives, and it turns out the secret of happiness is solitude interrupted by the occasional fling with a waitress?!”

Undervolt and set tjmax to 75C, done,

 

[Betonhaus]

A MacBook Air will be made obsolete when Apple decides to stop updating the OS, and you are better off getting a refurb ThinkPad, which will be supported by some greybeard Linux distro until it gets too slow to be useful.

Here's the thing: Apple has full control over their OS and hardware. Although they have been adding AI features they make it optional, and otherwise their OS and hardware is largely static, with the M series chips not having any major new features since the M1, just more cores and more powerful cores.

Even today the six year old M1 Macs are fast computers with decent battery life, and Apple literally has made no changes that would force them to drop support in the foreseeable future. Heck, Apple has been working on efficiency so much that the MacBook Neo literally has an iPhone cpu and it runs fine.

 

[Akerman]

My old HP Notebook runs Linux with an AMD iGPU from 2014 and it actually still runs 720p YT videos very well, albeit when limited to 30FPS & the H.264 codec which unlike AV1 the iGPU supports for hardware acceleration. Theres only a few frame drops here and there, which you don't usually notice unless you go into the "Stats for Nerds" page but other than that I can watch videos on it just like you would on any other PC. If you haven't already, you can set videos to a frame limit of 30FPS and to use the x264 codec using this extension.

It's obviously not high end compared to my other systems, but if you grew up in the 2000s and were poor your baseline for a "working computer" is pretty low. My policy is to use stuff for as long as it functions, and tbf this PC was entry-level e-waste even on release, and yet it can still do all the basic tasks that it was originally marketed to do in 2026. Plus its even got a built in optical drive that also functions for DVD and AudioCDs, which for me is very useful.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

Here's the thing: Apple has full control over their OS and hardware. Although they have been adding AI features they make it optional, and otherwise their OS and hardware is largely static, with the M series chips not having any major new features since the M1, just more cores and more powerful cores.

That is irrelevant. They phase support out for devices normally after 5-6 years.

Even today the six year old M1 Macs are fast computers with decent battery life, and Apple literally has made no changes that would force them to drop support in the foreseeable future. Heck, Apple has been working on efficiency so much that the MacBook Neo literally has an iPhone cpu and it runs fine.

I used to own a 2014 MacBook Pro. There were no big architectural differences between a 2014 MacBook Pro and whatever the last Intel-based ones were.
Yet MacOS wasn't supported on my device. This was well before the ARM-based Macs were released. This is because they think they own the device and they want to force you to buy another one. They know most people won't bother installing another OS.

Apple is overpriced garbage. Every time I've bought anything from them, I've regretted it.