IME it feels much snappier than foot.

I mean, it’s a terminal emulator; what’s it supposed to show, a bunch of white text on black background?

The problem with xterm is that everything else about it sucks. The only other half-decent performer is mlterm which is decent but has its share of issues.

This one feels quite snappy; better than foot.

Chill, it’s just pandoc.

At the federal level, yes. There’s lots of things going wrong in the “greatest” country on earth. That doesn’t mean you should stick the head in the sand and ignore advocating for incremental improvements. If no sensible transport advocate actually does anything for it because they think there isn’t enough public support, you’ll never achieve that goal, no matter how many advocates there actually are.

Not just bikes recently released a video which touches on this topic with some more differentiated discussion:

https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-two-cities-used-to-be-the-same
https://youtu.be/4uqbsueNvag

I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. The Netherlands was also a car dependent place that bulldozed neighbourhoods for highways a few dozen years ago and look at where they are now. Change can happen, it just needs a critical mass of supporters and time, lots of time.

Journalism that has any tooth whatsoever would mostly fix this.

As long as no proper journalistic standards exists, populists can pour their BS down the media drain unquestioned, unchallenged. If that’s all you hear about a topic, that’s what you’ll believe.

I consider Beat Saber to be one part of the essentials pack of modern VR gaming. As a rhythm game fan, it’s what got me hooked on VR

I’m not a rhythm game fan; Beat Saber is the only one I play an it’s amazing. It’s worth getting VR for this game alone.

!beatsaber@lemmy.ml btw.

I also have several virtual machines which take up about 100 GiB.

This would be the first thing I’d look into getting rid of.

Could these just be containers instead? What are they storing?

nix store (15 GiB)

How large is your (I assume home-manager) closure? If this is 2-3 generations worth, that sounds about right.

system libraries (/usr is 22.5 GiB).

That’s extremely large. Like, 2x of what you’d expect a typical system to have.

You should have a look at what’s using all that space using your system package manager.

EDIT: ncdu says I’ve stored 129.1 TiB lol

If you’re on btrfs and have a non-trivial subvolume setup, you can’t just let ncdu loose on the root subvolume. You need to take a more principled approach.

For assessing your actual working size, you need to ignore snapshots for instance as those are mostly the same extents as your “working set”.

You need to keep in mind that snapshots do themselves take up space too though, depending on how much you’ve deleted or written since taking the snapshot.

btdu is a great tool to analyse space usage of a non-trivial btrfs setup in a probabilistic fashion. It’s not available in many distros but you have Nix and we have it of course ;)

Snapshots are the #1 most likely cause for your space usage woes. Any space usage that you cannot explain using your working set is probably caused by them.

Also: Are you using transparent compression? IME it can reduce space usage of data that is similar to typical Nix store contents by about half.

You can do it but I wouldn’t recommend it for your use-case.

Caching is nice but only if the data that you need is actually cached. In the real world, this is unfortunately not always the case:

1. Data that you haven’t used it for a while may be evicted. If you need something infrequently, it’ll be extremely slow.
2. The cache layer doesn’t know what is actually important to be cached and cannot make smart decisions; all it sees is IO operations on blocks. Therefore, not all data that is important to cache is actually cached. Block-level caching solutions may only store some data in the cache where they (with their extremely limited view) think it’s most beneficial. Bcache for instance skips the cache entirely if writing the data to the cache would be slower than the assumed speed of the backing storage and only caches IO operations below a certain size.

Having data that must be fast always stored on fast storage is the best.

Manually separating data that needs to be fast from data that doesn’t is almost always better than relying on dumb caching that cannot know what data is the most beneficial to put or keep in the cache.

This brings us to the question: What are those 900GiB you store on your 1TiB drive?

That would be quite a lot if you only used the machine for regular desktop purposes, so clearly you’re storing something else too.

You should look at that data and see what of it actually needs fast access speeds. If you store multimedia files (video, music, pictures etc.), those would be good candidates to instead store on a slower, more cost efficient storage medium.

You mentioned games which can be quite large these days. If you keep currently unplayed games around because you might play them again at some point in the future and don’t want to sit through a large download when that point comes, you could also simply create a new games library on the secondary drive and move currently not played but “cached” games into that library. If you need it accessible it’s right there immediately (albeit with slower loading times) and you can simply move the game back should you actively play it again.

You could even employ a hybrid approach where you carve out a small portion of your (then much emptier) fast storage to use for caching the slow storage. Just a few dozen GiB of SSD cache can make a huge difference in general HDD usability (e.g. browsing it) and 100-200G could accelerate a good bit of actual data too.

Basically what I wanted to ask is whether they’re taking this seriously and are doing demanding stuff or whether they’re just starting out with basic things. Also how important gaming vs. Unreal is to them; would they care if it took a bit longer to e.g. compile shaders if that meant 20% more fps?

Chances are that it doesn’t work there either. What actually does the OC is the kernel; the GUIs merely write the desired values into the correct files in /sys.

I used this for comparing the CPUs https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleCompare.php.

Okay, at least that’s not userbenchmark but what I said still applies: this number does not tell you anything of value.

My friend mostly works with unreal engine.

Oh, that’s quite something else than 3D rendering.

It’s been a while since I fiddled with it it but I didn’t do anything significant with it.

According to Puget systems’ benchmarks, this is one of those specific tasks where Intel CPUs are comparatively good but even here they’re basically only about on par with what AMD has to offer.

Something like the 9900x smokes the 14700k in almost every other productivity benchmark though.
If you care about productivity performance first and foremost, the 7950x could be a consideration at 16 high-performance actual cores which smokes anything Intel has to offer, including in Unreal. It’s by no means bad at gaming either but Intel 14th gen is surprisingly competitive against the non-x3D AMD chips for gaming purposes.
Though, again, CPU doesn’t matter all that much for gaming; GPU (and IMHO monitor) are much more important. (Some specific games such as MMOs are exceptions to this though.)

Its their for them to be able to work basically

As in professional work? Shouldn’t their employer provide them with a sufficiently powerful system then?

If you talk about “a GUI for systemd”, you obviously mean its most central and defining component which is the service manager. I’m going to assume you’re arguing in bad faith from here on out because I consider that to be glaringly obvious.

systemd-boot still has no connection to systemd the service manager. It doesn’t even run at the same time. Anything concerning it is part of the static system configuration, not runtime state.
udevd doesn’t interact with it in any significant user-relevant way either and it too is mostly static system configuration state.

journald would be an obvious thing that you would want integrated into a systemd GUI but even that could theoretically be optional. Though it’d still be useful without, it would diminish the usefulness of the systemd GUI significantly IMHO.
It’s also not disparate at all as it provides information on the same set of services that systemd manages and i.e. systemctl has journald integration too. You use the exact same identifiers.

Any compatible motherboard generally works for the CPU.

With AMD, this is basically a non-issue but high-end Intel CPUs are so incredibly power hungry that a motherboard VRMs can become a limiting factor. More money isn’t always better here though; a 120€ board could be better than a 300€ one. You’d have to look up the specific board.

Most important though is feature support which mostly boils down to what I/O you need. E.g. NVMe slots, expansion cards, thunderbolt, networking or even just how many USB-A ports there are.

I don’t have any specific requirements here, so I’ve so far gone with one of the least expensive boards that isn’t utter trash and I’ve had no issues.

but I checked the CPU benchmarks of other AMD processors at that price range and also more cores.

Which benchmarks? There’s a notorious site out there that has “benchmarks” so biased to the point of being as good as non-factual.

Hardware benchmarks are not a simple topic, so any one number that you see presented as “the truth” will be wrong for a thousand reasons. Please always use real-world benchmarks that closely resemble your actual projected usage (i.e. the games your friend likes to play) for gauging hardware performance.

My friend wants the PC for 3D rendering and VR stuff, so more cores seemed better in my eyes.

That’s good to know. VR doesn’t need any more CPU perf than regular gaming but 3D rendering can. It highly depends on what kind of 3D rendering your friend is doing though as you’d typically do that on the GPU; preferring GPU power even more than games.

Which specific software is this? Some software can’t do GPU rendering but i.e. Blender can (and you certainly want an Nvidia GPU for that). You’d also probably want more VRAM then.

Also, are they doing this as an actual hobby; spending significant time on it or is it just a side interest? The latter use-case can be satisfied by any reasonably powerful system, the former justifies more investment.

If you wanted a distro where everything is set up for you OOTB, not requiring tinkering, you should not have installed Arch mate.

As mentioned, those are entirely separate and even independent components.

Systemd (as in: pid1) only “manages” them insofar as that it controls their running processes just like any other service on your system.

systemd-boot doesn’t interact with systemd at all; it’s not even a Linux program.

The reason these components have “systemd” in their name is that these components are maintained by the same people as part of the greater systemd project. They have no further relation to systemd pid1 (the service manager).

Whoever told you otherwise milead you and likely had an agenda or was transitively mislead by someone who does. Please don’t spread disinformation further.

You can totally turn an old computer into a NAS. I prsonally don’t see any point in NAS appliances for this reason.

You should consider downgrading it though as power efficiency is paramount in a NAS while performance barely matters.

I think 12G is fine tbh. By the time we need more, the GPU is probably obsolete anyways.