Well KDE had this awesome process management tool, I think it was called System Monitor or something. You could tune process priorities with IO and CPU. They deprecated the tool though, I think because nobody wanted to port it to QT6
EDIT: It’s not System Monitor. I can’t recall the name, but there used to be an app that let you set niceness / priorities of your processes.
HardInfo2 may be interesting to you
Should be plenty fast enough to handle Gnome or KDE. I think you’ll also want ZRAM because presumably your RAM won’t be much and your storage will either be slow or limited. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to enable.
I think both DEs are very touchscreen viable, with the possibility that you may have to configure a teeny bit, like adding a virtual keyboard
TVs have a history of listening and collecting a lot more data than a smart device.
With a TV device like an android or Linux box, you can prevent that as well as ad-injection because you can install whatever you want on the device and it’s not as locked down as a TV. You can even disable or physically remove recording devices if you’d like, and many smart boxes do not even come with them.
Also, a pihole does not guarantee you filtered out everything or prevented the TV from interfering with your experience.
A TV can also change its policy on the fly and suddenly start injecting ads. Many TVs do this to add additional income after your purchase.
I remember about a decade ago, when I was a student, I helped a small company with some office work. An office admin showed me various things using her computer, such as their QuickBooks data. The bevy of ads I saw suggested to me that she was a religious, dog-owning, single parent, and she was clearly seeking a partner and she was about 50 years old. I got all this just from the front page of her yahoo and was blown away at how specific and personal those ads were. And some of the ads were Spanish so she’s easily bilingual.
Totally creeped me out and I wasn’t sure she even knew that her computer was just broadcasting to her office all her personal info. She regularly collaborated with countless others, even new faces, using this same computer, where anyone could see what I saw.
I’m rooting for Intel in these efforts. Hopefully someone can pressure TSMC 's prices down and maybe even offer alternative fab sources for chips. Especially with the geopolitical situations with China.
I probably sound like a crazy person, but sometimes I worry about too much global reliance on TSMC and their plants usually being in Asia. Diversity should keep the market more affordable and at lower overall risk.
I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.
Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.
This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.
Funny how a company that is known for extortion is parading itself as something that looks out for cheating in reviews.
A big benefit of encryption is that if your stuff is stolen, it adds a lot of time for you to change passwords and invalidate any signed in accounts, email credentials, login sessions, etc.
This is true even if a sophisticated person steals the computer. If you leave it wide open then they can go right in and copy your cookies, logins, and passwords way faster. But if it’s encrypted, they need to plug your drive into their system and try to crack your stuff, which takes decent time to set up. And the cracking itself, even if it takes only hours, would be even more time you can use to secure your online accounts.
On Linux, my installs always had a checkbox plus a password form for the encryption.