Ah, so it does [1]. Apologies! Perhaps another older Thinkpad has a 12" screen? From what I’ve heard, and from my experience with my own T460, they’re usually pretty solid laptops, so if you could find one with the specs that you are seeking, I would say that it’s worth considering.

Older Thinkpad (eg T460)?

Dang, that’s pretty neat! Man, there’s probably going to be some funky bugs with legacy code getting included into Rust.

I thought Rust already had several different methods for interacting with C++?

Oh? Would you mind sharing them? It would be absolutely fantastic if such a thing existed and is mature enough to be practically used.

Personally, I have little interest in learning or dealing with C++ solely for the sake of developing KDE applications. I would much rather use Rust.

Imo, restricting the languages that can be used for app development cuts out large swaths of developers who would otherwise be eager to develop software for the project. I’m sure there are some who wouldn’t mind picking up C++ for this cause, but I’d wager that they are a minority. Gnome beats out KDE in that regard, imo, as GTK has bindings and documentation for many languages.

That’ll definitely come in handy. Thanks!

without having to reboot to run the installer?

I’m not sure that I understand what you mean. Are you saying that you want to be able to load the OS without having to reboot your computer? Or are you saying that you just don’t want to have to click the equivalent of “try the OS” when booting a live USB? If it’s the latter, you should be able to just select the flash drive as the install point (though, tbc, I have never tried this, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work) (I think you’d need 2 USBs, though — you’d need 1 to be the installer source, and one to be the install point — I don’t think theres any installer that can run as a desktop application. Though, if it’s Arch Linux, you might actually be able to call pacstrap from the host OS — I’ve never tried this after having already installed the OS). There’s even OS’s that are specifically designed to be ephemeral on hardware in this way — eg Tails OS.

This is amazing! Thank you so much for doing this!! Would you mind telling me your process for extracting the data from the graph? Did you tediously manually extract eye-balled data-points? Or, did you run it through some software which extracted them? Or, perhaps, did you just find and use the original data source?

I’d like to see a logarithmic version of this graph. Picking out a straight line in a log graph is easier than trying to discern an exponential. I want that juicy exponential.

The secret to success: survivorship bias.

Watch for battery life when buying older Surface devices. Replacing batteries in the older Surface Pros is notoriously difficult, because apparently the whole assembly is glued together.

Thank you very much for the heads up!

Newer versions are apparently more repairable, but you’ll have to investigate where that cut-off line of repairability is.

It looks like an attempt at heading in the direction of repairability started with the Surface Pro 9, but it’s still quite involved [1][2].

That’s perfect!

Given that Lemmy’s mascot looks like a mouse (I think it’s technically a lemming), an idea that came to my mind was “cheese day”.

Thank you for pointing out, by example, a flaw in my original title 😆

Speed tests, in order to be accurate, need to download a reasonable amount from each server.

How much data does Reflector download for each test?

This is why:

it takes quite a while to sort through 200 mirrors.

It could simply be that Reflector isn’t overly efficient handling back-to-back tests. Perhaps there is a substantial idle period between tests that is eating up a large chunk of the total test time. Anecdotally, I have seen activity that suggests this in my network activity monitor — there are very short spikes and a comparatively long idle period in between.

You dont need one.

If one doesn’t want to make arbitrary decisions then yes evidence would be required.

You will never notice the difference between the fastest one yesterday and the fastest one today

Lost time is still lost time. I’d prefer to saturate my connection. Anything less is an inefficiency. Small losses in time add up.

If everyone did it every day that would be a significant load

Given that I update daily, I feel that the quick connection to the server to test it’s bandwidth at boot is rather insignificant.

The mirrors speeds don’t change that often to need to worry about always being on the absolute fastest.

Have there been any credible studies that have looked at the reliability of the mirrors? The reliability would give one an idea on how often they should refresh their mirrors.

Especially if you are updating the the background anyway

You’re updating in the background on Arch Linux?

Is it normal to run reflector regularly/on boot?

It’s normal enough that it comes with the Systemd Service that runs on boot. The ArchWiki also makes mention of it.

Not sure how often you reboot

Usually every day.

maybe once a week would be sufficient?

Whether it’s sufficient is mostly dependent on how volatile the mirrors are, which I’m not entirely aware of.

What the fuck. That’s horrifying. I also though that every sensible workplace bans the use of AI.

I don’t see it as being different than any other tool. Aside from the ethical discussions, and assuming that it is being used as if it were simply a tool, if it increases productivity, then what’s the issue?

Yeah, I agree — it feels unnecessarily ambiguous.