Computer talk - COVID and W@H

[vdeane]

Have you tried System76? My current laptop is from them, and I'm pretty happy with it as far as laptops go. They have their own distro (PopOS) that is very close to Ubuntu. They do make desktops, but it's been a long time since I used one of them, though I remember the one I did use was pretty impressive.

They will most likely be where I end up when it's time to replace my laptop (just bought last year, so hopefully not for a while).  I'd probably just get Ubuntu and replace it with Mint, though ZAReason's "no OS" option was easier since then I didn't need to blow anything away.  I'm not sure how bad that would be for a drive; my current laptop has a SSD for the OS and a traditional HHD for my files and timeshift snapshots.  It's actually my first SSD, so I'm not sure how much of a problem the number of writes lifespan is a problem these days.

Regarding their desktops, I still have an optical drive for the very rare occasion that I need to access a CD and was hoping to get a card reader for my next whenever that comes up (connecting the USB one is more annoying than I thought it would be when I got it), and that wouldn't seem to be possible; plus they don't even seem to have front ports for whatever reason and have some weird wood theme.  I suppose I could try to copy the specs and assemble something myself, but the last time I tried to assemble a computer myself, I did something wrong with the CPU and had to take it in to a repair place.

so Alt-Tabbing becomes a nuisance very quickly due to the way MS Windows treats each Word document as a separate window.

Meanwhile, the way Windows treats all Excel files as the same window is annoying for other reasons.  Whenever I need to copy over conditional formatting rules I need to do way more mouse clicks than I otherwise would need to as the dialog must be closed and reopened for each spreadsheet.

I actually need to copy text from word documents to blank documents regularly for spell check purposes (no spell check in form text boxes), so for that at least, I'm thankful that Microsoft didn't try making Word behave as Excel does.

[J N Winkler]

They will most likely be where I end up when it's time to replace my laptop (just bought last year, so hopefully not for a while).  I'd probably just get Ubuntu and replace it with Mint, though ZAReason's "no OS" option was easier since then I didn't need to blow anything away.  I'm not sure how bad that would be for a drive; my current laptop has a SSD for the OS and a traditional HDD for my files and timeshift snapshots.  It's actually my first SSD, so I'm not sure how much of a problem the number of writes lifespan is these days.

I've been digging into these issues since my new laptop is the first I have had with a SSD.  This is what I have learned:

*  SSDs are regarded as a mature technology in the sense that the typical user is no more likely to encounter problems with inherent vice (such as flash cells becoming unavailable due to too many write/erase cycles) with them than he or she is with HDDs (mechanical failure, scratches on platter surfaces, etc.).

*  Details of SSD operation are abstracted in such a way that the OS has no awareness of how data is stored on the SSD.  For example, if it is divided into multiple logical partitions, there is no physical space on the drive that is allocated to any given partition--data is simply stored wherever it fits, given the SSD driver's rules for wear leveling and so on.

*  OSes (Windows definitely--not sure about *nix flavors) are typically SSD-aware to some degree.  If the primary partition is on a SSD, for example, hibernation is disabled by default (to avoid the need to write a hibernation file to a SSD), and the OS does not carry out defragmentation for a SSD the way it would for a HDD.  (The primary optimization function is trimming, which is erasing flash cells marked as deleted so that data can be written to them, since simply overwriting existing data is not possible with SSDs.)

Most of the threads about SSD issues on StackExchange and sister sites that have come back in Google searches have had last-posted dates in the mid-2010's.  This suggests to me that the possibility of their being more fragile than HDDs is no longer regarded as a salient concern in the tech community.

I am taking some time to learn Windows 10 before I attempt to migrate from my current Windows 7 machine.  (In some ways the state of the art has stolen a march on me in the 10 years I've spent on the same machine and OS:  for example, until two days ago I didn't know Paint now has 3D capability, or what GLB files are.)  One question to resolve is whether it is worth buying another perpetual license for Diskeeper not just to keep external HDDs defragmented but also for optimized writes to SSD.  Diskeeper (of course) claims SSDs can still experience significant performance drops even with the out-of-the-box optimization Windows provides, while others say the benefits of added write management are essentially non-noticeable outside an enterprise setting.