Uh oh. doubt is here :(

Yeah, I’m not buying the whole “because you’re not giving me the leeway for being young” blame either. Recently at work it was put into our duties to respond first to duress alarms of government officials and I was partnered with a much younger worker at the beginning of the new year. I must say, I’m very impressed. I have seen none of the characteristics you usually see from that cohort online in him. The kids are alright :slight_smile:

The Librem 5 won’t be a first-class gaming machine, but a few weeks ago some decent gaming videos were posted. 3GB of RAM isn’t bad for a phone. My iPhone 6s has 2GB of RAM, and it still runs really well, 4 1/2 years after I bought it.

I’m starting to feel old. My dad’s first computer was a TRS-80 (TRS stands for Tandy/Radio Shack). Dad spent a lot of money to max the TRS-80’s RAM out at… 48 KB. The first computer I bought with my own money was a generic 80286-based machine. It cost me $1,700, and had 1 MB of RAM (12 MHZ processor, and 40 MB hard drive). The Librem 5 has about 3,000 times the RAM of that 286!

The computer I am typing on (MacBook Pro) has 16 GB RAM, but our Dell Inspiron 11 running Debian has all of 2 GB (less than the L-5). The Dell runs surprisingly well!

I think the L-5 should be fine as a computer if you are doing word processing, email, maybe Python programming, some Linux games, etc. I don’t think it will be running Android Studio though :slight_smile:

9 Likes

Me too. And related to the RAM size thing, I suspect that the people who worry 3 GB is too small are probably younger. I remember coding on a “Fat Mac” which was called fat because it had so much memory – 512 kilobytes! And now we worry about not kilobytes, not megabytes, but gigabytes. If 3GB is “too small”, we just need to remove some unnecessary bloat. A computer does not need as much as 3 GB of memory, not really.

3 Likes

Ah you’re sounding like Bill Gates. :joy:

3 Likes

this is so weird … what did i type to give you the impression that i despise you ? you replied to me … but maybe you wanted to reply to someone else instead - and just clicked the wrong post ? i’m confused …

1 Like

I have to agree. I am 60, but work in a building with about 70 kids; almost all are engineers, and almost all are fresh out of school. My 4 direct reports range from 20 to 31. The kids are alright. There are all the normal, human, personality conflicts and foibles, but the kids I work with are in no way representative of media stereotypes of their generation. In fact, based on my personal experience, I would say that those stereotypes have little basis in fact. I am very proud of them all and have great confidence in our future because of them. :man_student::woman_teacher::man_mechanic::woman_scientist::man_technologist::woman_pilot::man_astronaut::raising_hand_woman::bowing_man:

2 Likes

in response to your last statement, qubes will have to disagree.

Just a note on your initial post:
It would enhance reading if you would split your post into several paragraphs. Block text is nice and compact like for a book but on my scroll able monitor I have enough space for a break every now and then.

4 Likes

Really? I am probably in the bracket of ‘kids’ that you’re referring to. I’m younger than 21 and let me just say that in my experience the stereo types are true for a shockingly large portion of people my age, however the ones that don’t fall into the stereo types are usually the total opposite.

It must just depend on where you are / who you associate with. All the people I work along side do not fit the stereo types at all, however people I know outside of work from school or through others I know. Well they definitely do fit the stereo type.

3 Likes

You plan to try run Qubes on a phone ?

Hell no. Barely able to run on my desktop so I got rid of it. I was responding to skalman.

1 Like

I already use my current phone as a laptop substitute and my main problem is battery, as my battery needs charging constantly due to being so old and I can’t charge and use my keyboard/mouse at the same time. Most Linux applications are fairly light, and for all my intensive tasks like rendering I can just use or remotely log in to my computer at home, provided that I am somewhere with decent WiFi. Web browsing can be slow and my mobile browser is sometimes shut down by the OS due to RAM usage, but that is mostly because Android 9 is programmed in an idiotic way where programs I hardly ever use are constantly using up RAM in the background without being able to be killed without them just restarting again, with the OS somehow deciding that the programs I actually use need to be killed instead.

2 Likes

Sometimes, young people may comment online in a fairly mature way too, but they don’t usually mention being young so this is not noticed.

For me, it’s mostly specific pieces of software, often either bloated or intensive, which take more than 3GB of RAM. One of the dumbest to do this is the web browser; Waterfox seems to accumulate RAM usage as it is running to a degree which I think is often quite rediculous for what it is running, and Chrome is even worse. Minecraft is also terribly bloated, a constant source of RAM trouble especially when modded.

Some more intensive tasks which use a lot of RAM for me are compiling and rendering. These two can be completely insane in their usage, outdoing me at 8 GB of RAM and in the case of particularly large programs and renders, even occasionally straining me at 24 GB! I don’t know why LuxCore has such trouble with high resolution (Cycles worked fine at absurd res, but to be fair it is tiled and was rendering something much simpler), but when rendering this, I had to reduce the massive amount of valley grass to an uncomfortably low amount, unrealistically increasing it’s size to make it fill more, and had to reduce the resolution to a “mere” 10800 by 5400, which was below the DPI of the printer I was printing this on. Maybe it would work better if I exported it to run in LuxCore stand-alone, though all of these would probably run MUCH better if they were designed to be a bit more lightweight in the first place. I heard tiled rendering could help, but in one of my previous tests it didn’t actually help much at all. Someday, I may finally make my own functional rendering engine, and perhaps then I will be able to make my renders much lighter-weight, even in massive worlds like the ones I like to design, probably by splitting a massive world into many recursive sub-objects and allowing more primatives like spheres instead of only polygonal geometry. I want earth-sized spheres to model on without numerous pointless polygons! Maybe dynamic subdivisions can work for now.

1 Like

By the way, in my high-school computer science class they made of use the idiotically bloated NodeJS to make some command line programs. Even testing with a simple hello world program, this thing took a couple seconds two run it as opposed to much, much less in my preferred language of C. I’m not even sure if mine took a millisecond to run. NodeJS also took much more RAM IIRC. I believe I tested it with the assigned program, and mine absolutely left it in the dust in terms of speed as well. Schools are teaching students to be terrible programmers, and I hate it. They had me use Bootstrap to do what could easily be done with bare flex boxes as well. I don’t like my code to be reliant on the same Javascript garbage I block due to how slow it makes things.

1 Like

Also, at some point I had to hack the bootloader to run Linux. Their computers have gotten worse and worse, and more locked down, over time, doing the digital equivilent of forcing students away from calligraphy to using the their own excrement to paint on walls, reducing them to the level of vermin. I HATE current school and their idiotic blocks of good tools and educational websites. I have seen blocks of Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, even blocks against the Google Sites editoes teachers use to edit their websites. People who decide to censor these things should… okey, I’m not going to say some kind of revenge because two wrongs don’t make a right, but they seriously should not be in this position of power.

At my current school there was a site we were using for history blocked due to being an “advocacy group”, and my current school is better than all of my previous ones in terms of technology. Some of the other sites I mentioned were also blocked at this school. This is why I use my ancient phone as a laptop, use a VPN and if that fails use my super slow 128 kb/s mobile internet, because I just can’t deal with all the garbage the people in charge throw at students. Schools fail to block CoolMathGames (which often don’t actually have anything to do with math) while blocking me from using actual educational sites!

Where did I get on this tangent again? Probably best to get on-topic now.

I can’t disagree – you’ll note that I didn’t generalize beyond my work kids. Even with my own kids, I’m only batting .500 — they range from 25, married and teaching high school to 35, in/out of jail, unemployed and living off one woman after another. The middle one stays out of trouble, but frankly likes marijuana enough to sap his ambition. I love them all, but as a parent, true victory has been elusive. My brothers and their kids range from in jail or homeless to MD/PhD, but their average is not even as good as mine. The truth is, raising kids is hard, but I want to give credit where it is due and support the good ones.

Like many people, I get pissed off at the stupid shit going on everyday, but when I take a deep breath and a broad view, things are better than they seem, getting better (on average) every day and humankind is more prosperous now than at any time in history. To bring it back around to the Librem 5, it isn’t the best phone in history, and it may not even succeed, but it is a historic step on the road to libre software/hardware and the right to repair. We need to support it like the good kids who “get it”.

5 Likes

Very true (and sometimes people assume one is 20 years younger than they actually are based on dumb stuff they’ve said online :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) We all have a choice was my point and age should not be an excuse to hide behind instead of owning what one said :slight_smile:

Uh did I not own up to something I said? I don’t think I’m using it as an excuse but simply making fun of myself for rec mocking and assuming my age to make fun of me as a joke.