People who don't have a thing are often very quick to disparage it because they don't want to feel pressured to get a thing. I see this all the time with high framerate monitors.

As someone who jumped from 60 to 240 hz, ask me anything. (Not really. It's nice, but not like crazy. Just like woah, seeing those old broadcast shows that were shot at 60 when most shows were 30.)

"I've never had X before so why do i need X now?" Still seems relevant. They are pushing 4k and 8k TV's, but i look at the price and say 'i'll nope out'. Same goes for many other things, EV's, SSD's, latest version of windows, latest video cards, smoking, drugs, trips to disneyland, etc. Don't see the point.

I'd probably stay with what's working, and upgrade only when it breaks or it's unavoidable. SSD's are quite avoidable, and boot times in the last couple decades has greatly increased, so there's less wasted time just to get to a workable point where you can load an app and do something.

I’ll install it on my HDD and see how it works. If it doesn’t work well I’ll move it over to my SDD. I usually use my SDD for my OS since I already burned through one SDD when I used it for gaming.

Actually, Linux can run on such small drives just fine. A command-line only installation works rather nicely on such a system, and even some GUI apps can be installed; even a web browser and some small games could be run on it. I've played many games on my $130 laptop, even though it only came with 64GB of storage. (I have since upgraded the storage; note that this is not usually possible, but I did do the research and found that my particular model could be upgraded with an M.2 SATA SSD. (Note: M.2 SATA SSDs are not usually what you're looking for, and you should only get one if your research indicates that's what your particular hardware needs.))

Another nice thing about this laptop is that it's fanless, which means it has no moving parts. That, in particular, is one nice advantage that it has over more powerful devices.

I have multiple machines with only 16Gb storage, and nearly half of that is still free, so yes it is just fine for a Proper OS. I'm not sure what your definition of a proper OS is, but generally it's a basic framework to access your hardware and storage. I've seen a "Proper OS" using no more than 2 floppy disks, one with the kernel and one with the initrd.gz file, which then loaded, heavily used BusyBox and was very usable for recovery work. 8bit machines came with a 16k ROM which often included BASIC and that was a full fledged OS. Yeah it wasn't graphical and wasn't what you have today, but it was very popular.

Most Linux installations i go for are lite, XFCE or something similar which only takes up like 2Gb of space if you're going for it, and add other tools as needed (or remove default ones)

If you drop the xWindows GUI, i think you can get away with like a 200Mb install. If you don't mind using EMacs or Vi, then you're likely good to go. Especially since Commandline pipes are far more powerful than are given credit for. And games not relying on xWindows and use SDL or SVGAlib or something are great too, direct hardware access. Actually when i put Fez on my GF's computer on linux, it was one of the games that worked on linux, and worked better than in windows.

Lately i've been grabbing refurbished Chromebooks, flashing and converting to cheap linux laptops, about $42 on newegg and an hour of your time. So this is very usable.

You could also use nano or joe as an editor. (I typically use joe myself.)

Also, these days Wayland is an option. (How does the size of a pure Wayland (no xwayland) setup compare to that of a typical xorg-based setup?)

There's even Rebecca Black Linux, which is a live CD that uses Wayland, and someone made a version with CONFIG_VT=n (in other words, the text-mode virtual terminals that are normally available on Linux systems are absent here).

Tiny vi is easy enough to do basic editing i usually found. And joe and nano i think aren't installed by default so when i need it i never tried to get it.

For a live-CD i actually found i like Slax too. Think i had issues with sound on the chromebook, which is the only reason i wasn't using it (then again, sound is said to be one of the most annoying things to get working in linux, compared to all other hardware).

nano is in debian's default install.

Well you're conservative in every possible way, I'll give ya that.

Then i guess it's my fault for never having used it because nano doesn't sound like an editor to me. :( Oh well.

Or just Frugal most of the time.

Some years ago when i was in the army, i gave myself 4 rules, following those purchasing rules i found i never spent more than i made. one such rule, was not to buy something i already had that did the same thing. So i will sometimes look at a large TV at Walmart and pine i can't get it even if it's a good deal, because i already had ones at home that did the job (albeit older and a bit smaller)

I like it.

I really dont know what kind of NASA-like gear some people here might have access to. In Germany, the average download time for 150 GB is several hours. Moving it from one drive to the other, on an average gaming machine, again, several hours. I dont want to start downloading a game on Monday so that I can take a closer look at it on Friday. Thats not my idea of enjoying games. Maybe my eyes are just so bad that I dont even notice a difference between 1920x1080 and 4k. Maybe its for devs more difficult to keep 4k stuff separated and optional than the way they are doing now. Market will solve it either way. If people are happy to buy 150+GB games, next step will be 300GB, probably. So that they can say biggest game ever lol. Reminds me of 24.000 dpi gaming mice.


What are the three other rules?

The fatal flaw where nothing lasts forever. Sorry to disappoint but spindrives in my experience fail sooner when used as daily os/game drive compared to ssd. Had notebook hdds falling apart ~5-6 year mark with data corruption/loss and tons of bad sectors, while desktops fared better with ~7-8years before looking like a swiss cheese. Long term storage nas hdds etc are a different case, but that is beyond the scope of use here as daily os/gaming drive.

Feels like a dajavu, but there is a good chance we talked about ssd longevity like last year where I posted smartada from my most used 240GB kingston sata ssd from 2013/2014 used as main os/game drive. It has tbw/endurance of 128TB and 1M power-on hours. The former is quite a conservative value for a mlc nand drive.

So here is an update (tldr: it's at 33.5TB out of 128TB write guarantee after 9-10 years of use. It outlived its practicality in terms of size and speed is not greatest by 2020s standards at least. At this pace it might reach to 2050s where quite frankly I might have other worries than 240GB ssd running out of life).

SMART READ DATA
Revision: 10
Attributes List
1: (SSD Raw Read Error Rate) Normalized Rate: 95 Sectors Read: 3627936 Read Errors: 0
5: (SSD Retired Block Count) Spare blocks remaining 100% Retired Block 0
9: (SSD Power-On Hours) Value 52 Total 42700 hrs 45 mins
12: (SSD Power Cycle Count) Power Cycle Life Remaining 96% Number of power cycles 4792
171: (SSD Program Fail Count) Program Error Count 0
172: (SSD Erase Fail Count) Erase Error Count 0
174: (SSD Unexpected power loss count) Unexpected power loss Count 438
177: (Wear Range Delta) Wear Range Delta 3%
181: (Program Fail Count) Program Error Count 0
182: (Erase Fail Count) Erase Error Count 0
187: (SSD Reported Uncorrectable Errors) Normalized Value 100 lifetime URAISE Errors 0
189: (Unrecognized Attribute) Value: 28 Raw Data: 1c 00 24 00 10 00 00
194: (SSD Temperature Monitoring) Normalized temp 28 Current 28 High 36 Low 16
195: (SSD ECC On-the-fly Count) Normalized Value 120 Sectors Read 3627936 UECC Count 0
196: (SSD Reallocation Event Count) Normalized Value 100 Reallocation Event Count 0
201: (SSD Uncorrectable Soft Read Error Rate)Normalized Value 120 Sectors Read 3627936 Uncorrectable Soft Error Count 0
204: (SSD Soft ECC Correction Rate (RAISE) Normalized Value 120 Sectors Read 3627936 Soft ECC Correction Count 0
230: (SSD Life Curve Status) Normalized Value 100
231: (SSD Life Left) Life Remaining 99%
233: (SSD Internal Reserved) 42364
234: (SSD Internal Reserved) 33485
241: (SSD Lifetime writes from host) lifetime writes 33485
242: (SSD Lifetime reads from host) lifetime reads 52892

Oh, i can tell you: I got a 10 Gbit Fiber Internet and because of my 10 Gbit Motherboard in theory most of this bandwidth can be used (realistically 6-8 Gbit taking away overhead). 150 GB, if the server is alright (Steam yes, GoG sometimes) it takes about 5 min downloading 150 GB. but can be done even faster (2-3 min).

However, this is no use if the drive can not handle it; in my case yes, the drive can write about 4-6 GB/s random write which is fast enough in order to support the required writing speed. Moving a file from drive A to drive B is about the same speed, it takes a few min. Moving it to a external SSD can be done using a 20 Gbit USB-C, but the final speed depends on the SSD attached to this USB-C slot.

OK, this is "high end enthusiast", and i do not expect 99% of the people to have this privileged situation; still very interesting regarding the possibilities we, in theory, could execute TODAY. Basically i got nothing, regarding connections, below 10 Gbit anymore; a few is even 20 Gbit.

Yet, the local politicians may still not feel the need of this extremely important infrastructures in a highly digitalized world, so a awful lot of people and/or locations are still at the stone-age; indeed.

I do not think the software or hardware is the issue. I think for almost any issues humans might have the issue is either heart or brain-related and you can only solve those issues using the heart and the brain.

I mean do what works for you, mate. I'm not criticizing. For me if I really enjoy something (RPG games) then it's worth some investment to have a better experience with that. But everyone's different.