he/him

got a degree in cs (is my biggest regret)

i play a lot of ffxiv

read my fair share of manga

p2p file sharing enjoyer with data hoarding tendencies

i use arch linux btw

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I feel like this is a big miss by framework. Maybe I just don’t understand because I already own a Velka 3 that i used happily for years and building small form factor with standard parts seems better than what this is offering. Better as in better performance, aesthetics, space optimization, upgradeability - SFF is not a cheap or easy way to build a computer.

    The biggest constraint building in the sub-5 liter format is GPU compatibility because not many manufacturers even make boards in the <180mm length category. Also can’t go much higher than 150-200 watts because cooling is so difficult. There are still options though, i rocked a PNY 1660 super for a long time, and the current most powerful option is a 4060ti. Although upgrades are limited to what manufacturers occasionally produce, it is upgradeable, and it is truly desktop performance.

    On the CPU side, you can physically put in whatever CPU you want. The only limitation is that the cooler, alpenfohn black ridge or noctua l9a/l9i, probably won’t have a good time cooling 100+ watts without aggressive undervolting and power limits. 65 watts TDP still gives you a ryzen 7 9700x.

    Motherboards have the SFF tax but are high quality in general. Flex ATX PSUs were a bit harder to find 5 or 6 years ago but now the black 600W enhance ENP is readily available from Velkase’s website. Drives and memory are completely standard. m.2 fits with the motherboard, 2.5in SATA also fits in one of the corners. Normal low profile DDR5 is replaceable / upgradeable.

    What framework is releasing is more like a laptop board in a ~4 liter case and I really don’t like that in order to upgrade any part of CPU, GPU or memory you have to replace the entire board because it’s soldered on APU and not socketed or discrete components. Framework’s enclosure hasn’t been designed to hold a motherboard+discrete GPU and the board doesn’t have a PCIe slot if you wanted to attach a card via riser in another case. It could be worse but I don’t see this as a good use of development resources.









  • Manjaro’s packages being separate from the main arch linux repository is really the kicker. It’s a completely preventable source of dependency issues especially when it comes to the aur. Instructions on the arch linux wiki won’t quite line up with what you need to do on Manjaro sometimes, and eventually you’ll be SOL if you only follow the arch wiki. You won’t understand the components of your system as well if you install Manjaro so a first-time user will have a harder experience fixing their machine.

    It’s a classic case of “if it aint broke don’t fix it”. Manjaro fixes a problem that never existed. Arch linux works perfectly as a daily driver. The installation process continues to get easier, and really there is no experience required, if you can follow instructions, the wiki goes into great detail on everything you need to do to get to a working system and keep it that way.



  • Not everything needs to be built from source, true, but certain software that isn’t in wide distribution may have source as the only option.

    Or maybe some tool hasn’t been properly updated and errors on your computer, maybe you can debug it and change a small amount of source code to fix it. Maybe the source release is far ahead of the stable binary release and you want to test or use new features.

    If you download the source for something like linux or ffmpeg or your favorite emulator, you will learn a whole lot by doing a deep dive.

    However. Gentoo. Have you ever built firefox from source? That shit contributes to global warming. It takes so much time and CPU power to build such a heavyweight application from source and the tangible productivity benefit that you get from compiling on your own machine rather than downloading a binary is far outweighed by waste from the sheer active CPU and real time spent building. Maybe if you had a threadripper distcc setup, and only a dial-up connection to update source, it would be faster to compile everything than to get new binaries all the time. But for everyone else, if all you want to do is use the software, downloading binaries for the most popular applications is the way to go.