I run Garuda because it’s a more convenient Arch with most relevant things preinstalled. I wanted a rolling release distro because in my experience traditional distros are stable until you have to do a version upgrade, at which point everything breaks and you’re better off just nuking the root partition and reinstalling from scratch. Rolling release distros have minor breakage all the time but don’t have those situations where you have to fix everything at the same time with a barely working emergency shell.

The AUR is kinda nice as well. It certainly beats having to manually configure/make obscure software myself.

For the desktop I use KDE. I like the traditional desktop approach and I like being able to customize my environment. Also, I disagree with just about every decision the Gnome team has made since GTK3 so sticking to Qt programs where possible suits me fine. I prefer Wayland over X11; it works perfectly fine for me and has shiny new features X11 will never have.

I also have to admit I’m happy with systemd as an init system. I do have hangups over the massive scope creep of the project but the init component is pleasant to work with.

Given that after a long spell of using almost exclusively Windows I came back to desktop Linux only after windows 11 was announced, I’m quite happy with how well everything works. Sure, it’s not without issues but neither is Windows (or macOS for that matter).

I also have Linux running on my home server but that’s just a fire-and-forget CoreNAS installation that I tell to self-update every couple months. It does what it has to with no hassle.

To quote that same document:

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

That’s what I referred to. I don’t see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn’t have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn’t see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it’s going to die a bit sooner if it’s hot. (Also notice that we’re talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google’s “low” usage bracket) you probably won’t see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

That’s still not cheap when you account for inflation. Of course there’s a world of difference between “not cheap” and what they charge these days.

When did it just become expected that everybody would upgrade GPU’s every year and that’s suppose to be normal?

Somewhere around 1996 when the 3dfx Voodoo came out. Once a year was a relatively conservative upgrade schedule in the late 90s.

Never use Amazon for expensive electronics. There’s too much nonsense going on.

I tried to preorder a phone once. Sony offered a pair of earbuds as a preorder gift and I wanted that specific phone anyway so hey, why not. Unfortunately, their fulfillment partner happened to be Amazon.

Instead of my phone I received a book about Lemmy Kilmister. Oh, and they couldn’t correct the error; all they could do was to have me send the book back and get a refund and buy the phone again – which of course took me out of the preorder program.

Yeah, no. There’s too much bullshit with Amazon to trust them with expensive gear.

Given the usual quality of BIOS/UEFI option descriptions it’s remarkably close to being sensible. I would’ve expected something like “enables limiting CPUID maximum value”.

Now the big question is how many patents are relevant and who owns them. And even if it turns out to have cheap licensing, beating HDMI won’t be easy, as DisplayPort demonstrates. Technological superiority doesn’t mean shit if you can’t overcome HDMI’s network effect.

I have a Framework 16. Is it as well-built, efficient, or quiet as a MacBook Pro? Nope. But if something breaks I can easily replace it, and I can upgrade it without having to throw everything away. Also, hot-swappable ports. That’s nice too.

It’s all about trade-offs in the end.