All good, but I think it’s really often a misconception that a DE like KDE, which is big and brings tons of features, must be more ressource intensive than a (feature wise) smaller DE. Which, as the benchmarks show, is surprisingly not the case.

Look on phoronix for benchmarks. Plasma consumes less RAM and CPU than even XFCE.

I don’t think it got worse. At least in regards to webcams. It looks more like that for many years they essentially re-used the same sensors in different cams and didn’t really evolve. Which always seemed weird, given that smartphone with fantastic sensors have been around for ages now - with lenses which are likely even smaller than what a webcam would be able to allow. Only the relatively recent home office trend has brought some change. But so far it still doesn’t look too good.

It was a Logitech C922. It’s a piece of shit though. A bit less than other webcams I had, but I can’t even properly key out my greenscreen if the lighting in the room is not 100% perfect. With the smartphone cam it works even with completly shitty lighting.

The only webcam I would have somewhat hope in would be the Obsbot Tiny 2, but €350 is too much for something I can solve with an old smartphone. (Also I don’t need 70% of the features of the obsbot tiny; I mainly want a good sensor and image processing.)

I bought one of those arms you can attach to the desk and then position as necessary. They have a standard ISO mount you can use for cams, microphones, etc… I also attached my normal webcam to it before. No I have a smartphone mount (this one, to be precise) on it.

True, you will need 10 to 20 seconds setup each time. But the video quality is really impressive. And another upside: you can be damn sure that no one watches you without you knowing, because you have to setup the cam each time and it doesn’t just sit there. But I guess that’s only a minor advantage.

I put up a specific mount to quickly put the smartphone in place and have a dedicated charger cable right beside it I just need to attach real quick. If I used my iPhone, I could probably make use of the MagSafe mechanism to mount and charge in one go. (I think there are also MagSafe compatible cases for other phones, so that might be something to think about in general.)

Do you have an old SmartPhone lying around? Or could you put aside your SmartPhone during those usage scenarios? Then grab DroidCam (or rather DroidCam OBS, if you mainly need it together with OBS) and you have a camera quality that can compete with dedicated cameras (not webcams). Almost all webcams suck hard in comparison.

They should have code-named this release “Brooklyn”.

Awesome Keyboard with AI Support *

* On supported Operating Systems **

** With separate subscription.

I think it’s technically still there… hidden behind custom fronts.

Google had deals that were revealed. For example Spotify was exempt from paying those 30%.

You should consider using distrobox and/or apx, so you can effectively run any software from any package manager from any distro.

You could have a bottled archlinux where you install and run cutting edge stuff.

ZFS cache will mark itself as such, so if the kernel needs more RAM for applications it can just dump some of the ZFS cache and use whatever it needs.

In theory. Practically unless I limit the max ARC size, processes get OOM killed quite frequently here.

For fileservers ZFS (and by extension btrfs) have a clear advantage. The main thing is, that you can relatively easily extend and section off storage pools. For ext4 you would need LVM to somewhat achieve something similar, but it’s still not as mighty as what ZFS (and btrfs) offer out of the box.

ZFS also has a lot of caching strategies specifically optimized for storage boxes. Means: it will eat your RAM, but become pretty fast. That’s not a trade-off you want on a desktop (or a multi purpose server), since you typically also need RAM for applications running. But on a NAS, that is completely fine. AFAIK TrueNAS defaults to ZFS. Synology uses btrfs by default. Proxmox runs on ZFS.

It likely has an edge. But I think on SSDs the advantage is negligible. Also games have the most performance critical stuff in-memory anyway so the only thing you could optimize is read performance when changing scenes.

Here are some comparisons: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems

But again … practically you can likely ignore the difference for desktop usage (also gaming). The workloads where it matters are typically on servers with high throughput where latencies accumulate quickly.

As with every software/product: they have different features.

ZFS is not really hip. It’s pretty old. But also pretty solid. Unfortunately it’s licensed in a way that is maybe incompatible with the GPL, so no one wants to take the risk of trying to get it into Linux. So in the Linux world it is always a third-party-addon. In the BSD or Solaris world though …

btrfs has similar goals as ZFS (more to that soon) but has been developed right inside the kernel all along, so it typically works out of the box. It has a bit of a complicated history with it’s stability/reliability from which it still suffers (the history, not the stability). Many/most people run it with zero problems, some will still cite problems they had in the past, some apparently also still have problems.

bcachefs is also looming around the corner and might tackle problems differently, bringing us all the nice features with less bugs (optimism, yay). But it’s an even younger FS than btrfs, so only time will tell.

ext4 is an iteration on ext3 on ext2. So it’s pretty fucking stable and heavily battle tested.

Now why even care? ZFS, btrfs and bcachefs are filesystems following the COW philisophy (copy on write), meaning you might lose a bit performance but win on reliability. It also allows easily enabling snapshots, which all three bring you out of the box. So you can basically say “mark the current state of the filesystem with tag/label/whatever ‘x’” and every subsequent changes (since they are copies) will not touch the old snapshots, allowing you to easily roll back a whole partition. (Of course that takes up space, but only incrementally.)

They also bring native support for different RAID levels making additional layers like mdadm unnecessary. In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.

For typical desktop use: ext4 is totally fine. Snapshots are extremely convenient if something breaks and you can basically revert the changes back in a single command. They don’t replace a backup strategy, so in the end you should have some data security measures in place anyway.

*Edit: forgot a word.

Does this replace the third party Better Thermostat?

To execute more than one process, you need to explicitly bring along some supervisor or use a more compicated entrypoint script that orchestrates this. But most container images have a simple entrypoint pointing to a single binary (or at most running a script to do some filesystem/permission setup and then run a single process).

Containers running multiple processes are possible, but hard to pull off and therefore rarely used.

What you likely think of are the files included in the images. Sure, some images bring more libs and executables along. But they are not started and/or running in the background (unless you explicitly start them as the entrypoint or using for example docker exec).

The point with an external drive is fine (I did that on my RPi as well), but the point with performance overhead due to containers is incorrect. The processes in the container run directly on the host. You even see the processes in ps. They are simply confined using cgroups to be isolated to different degrees.

If the application in question doesn’t need to write anything, it also doesn’t write outside of docker, so it also won’t wear down the SD card.

If the app has to write something, a fully read-only container will simply not work (the app will crash or fail otherwise).