I was surprised recently as I had to fill in a massive form based site for UK NHS mental health survey stuff. The site appeared as a flat background old style early 2000’s sort of thing with bits of comic sans in it. I nearly died when I first saw it expecting a shit show.
But it turned out to be responsive and fast. It worked perfectly from end to end and had little to no JavaScript. It was by far the best thing I’ve used for years. There were over 100 page transitions in total. It wasn’t an SPA but a classic web site with little or no intelligence. Seemed to be backed by python.
I think “Linux supported” is a vague promise that should not be relied on. I had a T495s which is supported officially on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. And it was quite frankly broken. Closing the lid didn’t work, it drank batteries faster than windows by a mile and plugging in external displays caused the X server to crash.
This is unfortunately every experience I’ve had with Linux on native hardware to some capacity in the last 24 years of using it other than dumb headless servers. So I use windows as the native OS and virtualise anything else.
I totally get that. I did exactly the same. Cost £8 at the time if I remember as well which is a hell of a lot of money for an LED. It was just so different to the yellow, red and green ones. I was buying a bit of the future.
But roll on to today and the things are mostly a nuisance
In my life. I’ve got one shining at me off my monitor now. If I scoot myself up in my chair a bit it doesn’t annoy me as much. I may stick some tape over it.
Still, RIP Mr Akasaki. Your contribution to the world is a net good one. Without it we probably wouldn’t have white leds :)
I treat my home network as insecure and use an off the shelf ISP provided router (FritzBox). I have saved hours of my life doing this. I was running various unixy things over the years and suddenly something went snap and I decided not to bother.
It’s fine for corporate and medium sized networks but not worth it for home stuff any more. Just costs time, money and eats a lot of power.
Between the horrible centralisation of Linux under red hat, the treatment of centos users, jumping in bed with Microsoft and selling out to IBM, I have no appetite for a round of moral high grounding from a cookie cutter corporate mouthpiece.
Figures you have to look at to be scared about in this space is an RTX 3070 can pull 250 watts and the core is 1.2v (I haven’t confirmed this) then the card can be sucking up an average of 200 amps. Which is a lot. Peak currents can be a lot more than that too.