pixeldaemon

I currently have no opportunity to upgrade my laptop, but I need to perform resource-intensive tasks on it. The real bottlenecks are the CPU (Ryzen 3250U 2,6GHz) and the RAM (8GB DDR4). The core problem is the RAM amount. 8GB is nothing, and 2,3 of it is statically reserved by the integrated GPU, while GPU does not actually matter for my needs, so I have only 5,7GB available no matter what. I also think that the CPU is actual junk. But as I said, cannot upgrade rn, but need some performance.

Sooo, how do I actually reduce the RAM amount reserved by the GPU? I have no such option in BIOS.

Also, does Windows 10/11 choice matter, considering that I will use a solid debloating script? UPDATE: I can not use Linux. Even though I want to. The programs I need have no Linux alternatives and are very tricky under wine.

Any other advice on optimizing the existing hardware and Windows are welcome.

There is lots of books, videos and manuals about bash. So it is hard to tell if one is good or not. By advanced bash I mean regular expressions, complex scripts, and kind-of obscure options of basic commands no beginner tutorial tells about.

Every website used to be like "www.example.com". Now I rarely encounter this "www.". Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but "ww1." instead of "www.", these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?

I'm a beginner in programming, and I found out I cannot even reproduce a simple number guessing program I have earlier copied from a book.

Is it a beginner issue, or there is more than just continuing to learn to be able to code without hints?

There was an issue with Zen about a year ago, it used to send Mozilla telemetry requests, and the developers had ignored any complaints on it. Anyone knows if the situation has changed since?

I found nothing on how private Helium is. People usually just say it is garbage because of the engine, but that's not what I care about.

Personally I haven't. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it's whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.

I'm not trying to bait. I've been playing with Void for a while, but didn't get what makes it special. I guess I'm missing something about it.

I want to switch to another DE on Fedora, from KDE to COSMIC, is it possible to switch in some simple way, kind of with rpm-ostree or something? I've searched the web but only found info on doing this with Atomic desktops, but I'm not using one and not planning to yet

I've installed Void Linux base image and my backspace key is broken when I am root, it types '^H' instead of erasing. Function keys also type something weird, but at least the brighness-related ones do work.

This only applies to the root shell, it all works perfectly when I login as a normal user. Probably a bashrc issue?

UPD: I typed 'stty erase ^H' in the shell and it now works.

That doesn't apply to Linux communities on Lemmy though, but I meet a lot of Linux communities, that are toxic and beginner-unfriendly. People, who have voluntarily decided to maintain a community, behave like I broke into their house at 3 AM with my questions. If I ask a question, there will be a 20% chance to get any relevant response, but a 100% chance of being nagged with some bullshit. It especially applies to the behaviour of mods. For instance, a dude was messing with me because I have searched for a binary on the official internet database, instead of quering it via package manager.

I wish I could just avoid junkyards like that, but I can't: I haven't found another active community for Void Linux.

As far as I can tell from my experience, it is something specific to Linux or IT communities.

So why is it like this?

Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don't look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.

Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.

What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?