So long as you’re using the spinning rust hdds, the noise of the CPU cooler won’t make much difference. Mind you, this PC will be a bit too loud for the living room like this.

If you’re already going for spinning rust hard disks, why limit yourself to the 3 TB ones? IMHO, these days, spinning rust only makes sense at 8 TB+ per disk.

Gnome is highly international, and has been for most of its existence.

I’m currently maintaining a laptop with kubuntu (for someone else), and I honestly cannot recommend it.

They have kind of messed up the updates in their Plasma flavor, Discover routinely just fails to do the updates with a completely meaningless error message. I suspect the underlying issue is lock contention with the background service “unattended-upgrades.service”, but I’m not sure, because, again, that error message is ridiculously unhelpful. Also, said unattended-upgrades service does not seem to actually be doing any upgrades.

On the last install, also, the attempt to upgrade from Ubuntu 24 to 26.04 LTS, the upgrade failed in a spectacularly fashion that left the system mostly bricked in ways that could only be solved by a fresh reinstall. During the process, a few error messages made it look like the problem was hardware faults on the SSD, except when I then tested the SSD from a rescue disk using dd, smartctl, and iotester from https://github.com/guidow/iotester, I could find absolutely no indication of any faults on that drive whatsoever…

Granted my opinion on kubuntu may be a bit colored, because right this moment, I’m quite frustrated with it.

Also, installing massively important software like Firefox or Thunderbird through snaps instead of packaging them properly is just asinine.

Unfortunately, your existing /home and the ntfs partitions you could remove are in completely non-contiguous regions, so you cannot easily just combine the space. If I were you, I would switch to LVM piece-meal. Ideally, you’d have some other medium were you can temporarily store the current contents of /home while your repartition the drive. Then combine sda2 and sda7 into a volume group and pull just one logical volume out of it for the new /home.

Otherwise, create a new volume group with only sda2 in it (just overwrite the existing ntfs filesystem) using vgcreate, create a logical on top of that using lvcreate, make a filesystem in that using mkfs.ext4, I would add the -m 0 parameter for a non-root filesystem, mount that somewhere under /mnt/, move or copy over all the contents from /home to that mountpoint, taking care to replicate file owners and permissions (I would just use cp -a), then once this is done (and you’ve double-checked that it is because at the next step you can lose data if you’re not careful), umount /home, extend the volume group to include sda7 using vgextend, enlarge the logical volume for the new /home to the maximum using lvresize, enlarge the ext4 filesystem in there to the maximum possible using resize2fs, finally editing /etx/fstab to use that new logical volume as /home and remounting /home.

The nerd inside me automatically wants to correct that to

$ > grass

That avoids starting up one addidtional process.

(Unless the file already exists, and you just want to update its mtime, of course.)

I wouldn’t want to put the air intakes of my Thinkpad directly on the grass like that. It’s bound to suck in dirt.

Years ago, we used to use Etherpad for that. Don’t know if that’s still a thing.

It’s hard to believe how insanely long it took, and still is taking to get a production-ready, solid ntfs driver in linux.

Error correction and compression are usually at odds.

Not really. If your data compresses well, you can compress it by easily 60, 70%, then add Reed-Solomon forward error correction blocks at like 20% redundancy, and you’d still be up overall.

If any person actually typed that they aren’t sane at all.

That doesn’t actually rule out anything.

Saying RAM can help because you can reencode the video to h.264 or h.265 to make use of hardware decoding is more than a bit of a stretch. You can just reencode it to the normal disk instead. Unless it’s the speed of the local block device that’s the bottleneck here (and there’s no indication that it is, and it would be extremely unlikely), using a ramdisk/tmpfs for any part of that is just pointless.

Modern CPUs (from like the last 20 years) will throttle down a lot before they actually shut down. Unless your cooling is completely inadequate or somehow broken, shutdowns because of high load just dont happen. I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

A problem with cooling could also go some way to explaining your performance problems – but it could also just be that your system just doesn’t have the computing power to do what you want it to. The computing demands from video decoding go up dramatically when you go beyond 1080p. If I recall correctly, the Intel Core CPUs with the “U” at the end were the low-energy models (for longer battery life); of course that comes with compromises on the performance side.

The CPU model suggests that this is a laptop, and a fairly old one at that. I would look for things like blocked air ducts or broken fans if I were you. It’s also possible that the thermal compound between your CPU and the CPU cooler has dried out and needs replacing (although laptops of that power class should be using thermal contact solutions that do not dry out), or that contact has lessened for other reasons. Again, if your computer seriously powers down because of load, it’s borderline broken and in need of maintenance.

As for your other question, no RAM cannot help with that. It can hurt if you have too little of it, but once you have enough, the best it can do is not be a bottleneck.

* Edit: Also, make sure you are not setting down the laptop on anything soft, like a blanket, when using it. It will sink in and have its air intakes blocked if you do that.

Funny, I’ve never played Palworld on any platform other than Proton.

Looks like a very odd form factor. What kind of mainboard was that even?

Why the fuck is a Microsoft account so important to Windows that running it without one is considered a “loophole”?

Is OpenBSD seriously still using CVS for development?

The KDE team has already determined that this is not a bug and that both you and me must just be imagining it:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481058

“What is the remaining market value of your car?” is a massively important question for every car owner needing to have their finances in order. New cars depreciate faster than old ones, expensive cars depreciate faster than cheap cars. It is said that, when you buy a brand-new luxury sedan, just the simple act of driving it off of the lot will cost you easily 5000 dollars.

If you are not even allowed to sell your car, its market value at that point in time is effectively zero dollars. Keep that in mind when deciding what to buy.

About 20 years ago, Microsoft was found guilty and convicted, because they forced their browser on their users, driving out competitors by abusing their de facto monopoly on PC operating systems. These days, they are doing the exact same thing again, just on an even broader base. I don’t even understand how this verdict took so long.