Hayden James

I don't have one, but was considering buying one. I went looking for benchmarks a while back, and it seemed that it performed about as well as a several-year-old cheap laptop, from some guy's blog that I can't find right now. :-(

However, most reviews I've read have said that it generally performs better than you'd expect for its price, e.g Hayden James' review [0]. He later updated to say:

"""Two months later, I can report that although my Pinebook Pro still sees some usage, for the most part I’ve reverted to my old laptop. It’s a very capable laptop for the price and I still strongly recommend ownership! The lack of CPU and graphics performance was the eventual deal beaker for me. At times loading email messages in Gmail would take ages."""

After reading this, I still feel like it might be a decent chromebook alternative for the kids.

0: https://haydenjames.io/pinebook-pro-my-first-impressions-and-setup-tips/

malloc will take away from the disk cache.

Fwiw without swap there isn't really any paging in or out (yes mmapped files technically still can but they are basically a special cased type of swap) so your question is hard to parse in this context. The disk cache is all about using unallocated memory and an allocation will reduce it. Paging is irrelevant here.

Btw you should always enable swap. Without it you force all unused but allocated memory to live on physical RAM. Why would you want to do this? There's absolutely no benchmarks that show better performance with no swap. In fact it's almost always the opposite. Add some swap. Enjoy the performance boost!

https://haydenjames.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/

What languages do you program in?

I've used PHP for a while now. PHP is a language that favors practicality. It's a language that is depended on throughout the world and doesn't (purposely) change as fast to accommodate new trends

Having that said

- The value of machine learning has become very clear over the past decade or so

- 80% of websites on the web are powered by PHP

https://haydenjames.io/80-percent-web-powered-by-php/

I undoubtedly anticipate a steady rise in effort from the PHP community directed at practical applications of ML - Rubix ML being one of the first libraries to make these tools accessible to the PHP engineer

Because this matters: https://haydenjames.io/remove-snap-ubuntu-22-04-lts/

I've been getting "Firefox is updating in $time days" as a unstoppable notification, because snap uses highest priority to jam notifications through.

The best is to purge snap completely from the system. And the URL applies to 22.04, but likely also works mostly the same, with possibly more "snap list" crap to remove.

If I could properly administrate snap, and if it followed my settings, I'd use it. But it doesn't provide for ANY sort of reasonable administration nor respectable defaults. So it gets the axe.

Don't forget Part 2: https://haydenjames.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-part2-zram/

zram is cool, and I've noticed Fedora uses it out of the box. Much better than regular swap space on a disk.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#zram_or_zswap

Interestingly, my 64GB desktop has 50GB available between free and caches, yet has 95MB of swap space used (out of 8GB zram). How can I tell which process is swapped out? Probably something which I haven't ever needed since I've booted the PC.

Snap-Firefox is noticeably slower on startup for me as well. After upgrading to the latest Ubuntu where snap-Firefox is default, I completely uninstalled snap and all packages then installed from a PPA.

Everything is better and smoother now.

Ubuntu is great but snap continues to be the worst part about using it.

Edit: Instructions for removing snap completely and switching to non-snap Firefox as well (not my site):

https://haydenjames.io/remove-snap-ubuntu-22-04-lts/