I’m surprised how many people turn their computers off. My desktop uptime is 4 day, but, I do put it to sleep at night (which I think counts towards its uptime).

I will look into hibernating. The reason I don’t shut down is because I usually end up with carefully placed windows and lots of ongoing projects all over. Restarting would mean I’d have to start all that up again - assuming I remember what I was doing.

For whatever it’s worth - I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 4GB ZRAM device, and it can’t use all the ZRAM before everything grinds to a halt. I think the way ZRAM works best is if it can “swap out” (compress) anonymous pages that aren’t actually needed again right away, freeing up the fast memory for disk caching and other memory needs.

In my case, I think I can reach a point where the amount of memory Linux needs simultaneously active goes beyond the 4GB of RAM, so it’s just compressing/uncompressing forever and getting nowhere.

So, I think I’d argue that maybe you can’t go too big? I think only anonymous pages can get compressed, and there’s probably only so many gigabytes of those in memory at any given time.

YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.

I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn’t worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.

I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking “Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates.” And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?

So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.

Does Lemmy life feel any different using your private instance now?

Adding my “Me too” to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it’s legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to “append only,” which prevents ransomware or other unexpected “whoopsies” from wiping out your backup history.

I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don’t get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn’t want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going “whoops, I wanted that.”

I also have Vorta working on my Mom’s Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn’t any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.

I did this this year for wildfire smoke, and it works great. Having said that, it is not quiet and the way I was using it was to run it at full blast for an hour, then leave it off for most the day.

If you wanted an always-on solution, I think I’d actually suggest a commercial air purifier.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I’m doing next. When I’m functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

Actually… to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I’d prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a “Find” dialog and type something reasonable in.