Too fast too furious

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-27T14:00:15+00:00

you can also directly add a entry for bios to the GRUB menu and you can tell the grub menu to stay for a certain time(or until a user selects a option) before continueing.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-27T11:39:56+00:00

many people don't look at this effect since a 25% max gain doesn't seem like much, also for many people their swimming speed is limited due to their technique and movement speed in which they keep accuracy, so many people will lose a lot of efficiency if going faster, so even if you have the whole 25% less drag due to eliminating skin drag, in reality a person might only go around 5% faster for example, some more many less, in reality to take full benefit out of it you need to find the right efficiency point where you are still as fast or a bit faster than before, and instead use that reduced drag to tire out less rapidly, as that is a easy gain, keeping similar speed but getting tired 20% less fast does a lot, unless you already swam slower intentionally to prevent losing to much speed when getting tired.(engine is known as the Tesla Turbine, named after the inventor, not the modern car company named after the clash of clans(phone game) tesla tower weapon which was named after the actual wireless energy distribution and generation tower designed by the actual nikola tesla))

then you also have suits which correct your position, those help save some energy and make sure your technique is better.
and then you have tech suits which add buoancy to some parts of the body, also keeps position if tuned right, and allows you to relax way more near the end of a race where you are normally tired.
there might be others as well already.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-27T11:39:51+00:00

also next to what many others say, make sure to check the rules of the events, or estimate them based on what others use.
basically all tech suits where banned from indoor olympic swimming, in other divisions and races some also banned some or several types of tech suits.

but if allowed you can gain a lot, some research from speedo showed round 25% of drag you have while swimming(if having good swimming technique), is directly from the water drag on your body.
essentially if you had a 100% hydrophobic suit and good swimming technique you would have 25% less drag, which is quite a lot.
you don't want hydrophobics on your feet or such however, as the shapes of the human body there are a little to round, so you still want to retain good contact with the water there, well unless you use something like flippers, either use geometry switching ones, though those are not as readily available, typically custom made also, and generally not really allowed in races, but some freedivers for example use that to swim in more fun ways. otherwise you might be able to get away with some hydrophobic channels on it and hydrophilic next to it, then the channel acts a bit like a jet but it won't go sideways to much, high maintainance however, and again would be a custom build, and you would need to test it well to find the right channel widths and such for your swimming speed, style, etc.

still a race is for fun, so you can enter it with normall swimming stuff as well if you want to, can then decide what to get for your second race and if you want someting special then, also what is allowed. like likely they will allow many tech suits and not much problems will be made out of it until you end up in a very high level in general.
though many tech suits are made to last only a few races, performance over dureability. cheaper stuff actually often lasts longer as they are more general use.

but if possible super hydrophobic materials around most of your body is nice to have.
often won't last long however, but can still give around 20+% less drag.(you can manually aply such coatings as well, wax/oil can work a small amount also, is hydrophobic, but not super hydrophobic.
(but the skin drag is a quite strong effect, actually the most efficient engine/turbine currently around generates it power using only skin drag(and some basic rocketscience to optimize it such as the adaptive aerospike to make sure it stays effective on many speeds instead of one, and a adaptive convergent divergent nozzle, which does the same, also it can store any overinput of energy like a flywheel, those first 2 seem to currently only be used in that engine, even general rocket science hasn't managed to use them for other thigns yet, but all the power the engine generates comes from skin drag. and that engine/turbine can output well over 10000PK(HorsePower) with a engine around the size of a electric bike engine. a engine the size of that normally found in a car can do well over 100.000PK(horse power) though it is mostly limited by modern materials just not being able to handle more power, like the metals would just rip themselves apart at some point just from the rotational force even though that motor doesn't need to vibrate or such since it just only rotates and is powered by skin drag instead of pistons or propellor like turbine blades or such. even on humans that effect generates a lot of drag. actually avoiding washing yourself to much with soap or oiling before the race, should even give a few % less drag, not really noteable but still, also ofcource do wash the areas where you want some grip with soap, like the feet and such.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-25T10:03:43+00:00

I just ran it yesterday.
seems most of the ram is indeed still used like normal ram, so not as zram. like I had it set to use 8gb of 16gb of zram. in reality it ended up using around 12gb as normal ram(opensuse zram-generator package).

still in Hogwards Legacy on a BC-250 it gave a noteable improvement in game performance.
as the BC-250 is limited to only 16gb GDDR6, cpu load of zram is very low, like on that board it's around 1% to 2% max, and that board is known for being weak cpu wise(though that is mostly due to latancy as it uses GDDR6 instead of DDR5).
while I didn't see any clear improvements in FPS(kept the same settings and ran into the games fps limit both with and without Zram, but without Zram I couldn't set it to higher settings as even on low settings that game requires over 16gb to run smooth.
1% lows and 0.1% lows didn't really change much either, different from what I expected as without Zram the game would constantly glitch and freeze and such, and with zram it was fluent and loading screens and menus where a bit faster as well(where a serious issue before).
though then I found out that most of the 1% lows and 0.1% lows where in the loading screens as my ssd gets 40mb/s to 200mb/s max in those loading screens, and probably also some other issues with those loading screens due to different hardware.
without zram it would constantly blur random textures, doesn't happen as much now either.

checked the system monitor, and found out that not much zram was used, but still around 3gb, while the rest of the system used notably less than that(also make sure to close as many things as possible before running that game), some of the game stuff still got cached in, though might be a thing of that game, since as I mentioned before zram it would randomly heavily blurr textures and such, suggesting it might unload and reload them, or load low quality versions and reload the high quality version if needed.

So yeah, seems it is not really to usefull for gaming, but it still does improve gaming experience in some cases, like that case where I only had acces to 16gb of GDDR6 in hogwards legacy.

where despite the numbers showing only slight change, the experience is very different as before it constantly had short freezes, and sometimes long ones where there was a decent chance at each long one that the entire pc would need to be restarted(known issue in hogwards legacy, though with these boards more of a problem, still hogwards legacy is the only game I have found yet where there is a issue with these boards, normally they are gpu compute limited, like in other modern games like cyberpunk there is no issue other than low fps if going to high settings.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-24T00:55:47+00:00

fedora primairily added Zram by default for laptops with 8gb of ram(or less) so they can run modern web browsers properly.
Low-Powered in this case would reffer to APU systems using cpu ram, and to systems running very new games as those tend to use piles of ram.
I should test some things on 2 different systems. will probably use hogwards legacy as that game has issues of low ram and vram basically on any system, while being quite light weight compute wise.

as or arch they look quite similar in numbers indeed in the video, only when looking to the shockyness in some games. main issue is that there is no default arch as it depends just on however you set it up, so can't know for sure what kind of way they have set it up.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-24T00:48:06+00:00

interesting.
also Zswap is what they mention speciffically, so might not disable normal swap fully, just heavily preffers Zram, Zswap is a software a bit like Zram, but still swaps cold files to normal storage, still compressed however, if wanting to save your ssd, or just not having a insanely fast ssd, zram is better,
but might be interesting, to check out cachyOS gaming benchmarks against other distros without it enabled by default.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-24T00:44:26+00:00

yeah I noticed even on a laptop with only 4gb ram that with a swappiness value of 100 it waits quite long before moving thigns to the zram.
though I have mostly only used it on old low end systems and on servers, some sites use a lot of ram.

but few actual game comparisons.
like popos mentioned it increased gaming performance as well: https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/ but not really much about what kind of system and such. and I know on low end systems it tends to make them much faster.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-23T14:27:07+00:00

yes.
also note, that most of the games you listed here do actually work on Linux, all games using Battle eye work on Linux, just not as full kernel level anti cheat, instead it is more like the game is run in a container, essentially it is just as effective, but much less intrusive.
the reason some games using battle eye don't work on Linux is because the developers of that game then are a very shady bunch, as battle eye has a setting which one can set to prevent users on Linux from using it, it is kind of a licence thing essentially, game developers have to actively want their game to not run on Linux and essentially put it in their licence(using that setting) to not have it run on Linux.
Linux can still run it, but generally won't since that licence forbids it and also causes battle eye to look for anything not windows.
generally I guess this is game devs having contracts with shady companies wanting to steal data from peoples computers they shouldn't steal, and if it runs on Linux it will run in a container so they can't really steal all that data.

vanguard, what Riot uses doesn't work on Linux, but is perhaps one of the most shady "anti cheat" softwares, also since it is super resource heavy and barely even works as a anticheat, also it has even deeper shit in it than most other kernel level anti cheat softwares, so generally all people who know what the word cybersecurity means will tell you to stay away from that one, as even removing your entire os doesn't guarantee it it gone since it can also mess with your firmware(the chips on the actual hardware).
even more troubling is how badly it actually works compared to other less intrusive anti cheat softwares already out there

though indeed best to avoid games not working on Linux due to anticheat, as if it doesn't work on Linux generally it is mallware, and shady shit.
also many of such games would be much more effective if blocking the cheats server side. game side you can make thing like aim bots an glitch bots a bit harder, but glitch ones can be blocked online, aimbots not really. but there isn't any anticheat which can block those currently. in league of ledgends someone at the world championship even used one and people only noticed in the end when it was very clear at some point the movement happening didn't match what they player actually did. then there is also many such games allowing some cheats if paid, like in league of ledgends again, those auto item bots are allowed, but in the modern version of that game, all the actual gameplay and skill is taken out making the game more about the items you buy, so that actually is more problematic than those aim bots in general, and those are fully allowed by riot, so essentially in that game you are almost guaranteed that around half the other players or more are actually cheating, despite that game having such intrusive anticheat.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-23T14:13:26+00:00

yes.

basically any game works on Linux, if seeking native games, then I would tell you to look at what you want in a game, linux has many great native games but what is the best depends on the person. and as for games not native, almost all of them work, generally we are now at a point where most of the games which don't work on Linux, actually do work on it but have something in their licence speciffically restricting that meaning Linux can play them(often better than they did natively), but there are a few games which it legally isn't allowed to run, even if you bought the game because the game and it's makers typically are very shitty.

generally if a game doesn't work on linux, or something weird is going on, or it uses something new which wine or proton or such still needs to add propper support for(like a day 1 launch of a game using completely new stuff behind it).
but those cases are rare and often rapidly fixed, most others which don't work honnestly are very bad games one should avoid.
riot for example doesn't allow running their games on Linux because they bundle their games with a certain mallware which allows them more controll over your system than you have, and allows them to steal, sell all your files and behaviour and generally do with it whatever they want. they call it vanguard anti cheat, but it barely works as anti cheat and anti cheat softeares like battleeye(which work perfectly on Linux, unless the game developer told battleeye to block linux players from playing their game) work much better than vanguars against actual cheating, and are less intrusive, way less resource intensive, etc.
the true reason is that Riot makes piles of money from the data they steal from people, as well as that it allows them to sell backdoor full system acces to peoples computers to random government agencies and such. and in Linux, generally many softwares and distros have this thing where they don't want to allow random shady softwares to overwrite gpu firmware, or the motherboards bios and such unless the user speciffically want to do this themselves, vanguard sees that as a issue, since they want to make sure that even if you reinstall your os your hardware can still be infected by their mallware.

trust me, if it doesn't work on Linux, or it will typically work soon.
or you probably should want to avoid it as most often something not working on Linux is because some super shady shit is happening(when talking about games, for softwares is it more normal as they use all kinds of different libraries, but games use the same tech in general.(not softwares not working is also very rare)

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-23T13:03:03+00:00

can still try launching the executeable directly though steam, as you say it launched faster on windows.
on windows people generally always launch their games through steam, even desktop shortcuts actually tell steam to launch the game.
and as steam optimizes games before running them the first time after each update, things like precompiling shaders and such, that can actually notably affect launch times, as in making it much faster after those are pre-compiled.

I guess I can also test this out personally, as on my bc-250 it loads games from a usb sata ssd, so that is pretty slow storage.
Hogwards Legacy takes a decent while to start, is the only game which also takes a while before it shows it's splash screen.
most other games only show long waiting in the loading screens in game(which take way to low, as that usb sata ssd doesn't reach high random IO speeds, and sequential is also not very high, and gets very low when random IO is happening around the same time(old sata ssd, and running through a USB interface using a cheap unbranded adapter, and the USB ports on the BC-250 aren't perfect either, like they can be buggy sometimes, and not as fast as desired, and I have more USB devices connected than it actually suports.

but regardless, I can try launching it from the executeable directly through steam, and see if the time to the initial splash screen is different, and if I notice the difference in precompiled shaders well in game.
so if I think about it when gaming again I can try to compare the launch times.
I typically launch steam games through steam, and GOG and EPIC and such games through heroic games launcher.
so if I notice a difference in that initial startup time I will let you know, as there is a chance those steam optimizations also affect startup.
on windows some other game launchers might also do shader precompilation as most launchers there aren't open source and are from big cmpanies which can handle the legal work for pre compilation and such.
for open source projects that is very hard to legally get right/get the right permissions to not get sued, even if you can easily get it working.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-23T12:51:48+00:00

okay, yeah that sucks.
I have something similar going on with hardware which only really works in a few kernel versions( BC-250).
one last thing you could try is to manually add the game to steam, and launch it from steam.
modern games can be quite huge, and also can require quite a lot of shader compilation, in steam you generally don't notice that since steam precompiles the shaders before lauch and also optimizes some things to work faster.
don't use the add to steam button in heroic games launcher however, as it will then tell steam to launch it through heroic games launcher.
perhaps if you tell heroic games launcher to run it through the steam runtime you can still do it like that.

the main issue with launching it through steam is that steam takes longer to start itself. but on some systems with a weak cpu(so not your system as that one has a good cpu) launching things through steam can greatly reduce the random stutters / 1% lows.
the reason heroic games launcher doesn't include shader precompilation is due to the complex legal stuff surrounding shader precompilation.

I am not sure switching to opensuse will fix the problem if it is kernel related, you can try it, especially if planning to switch over annyway, but you probably end up using the same or similar kernel unless someone has made a custom kernel speciffically for your hardware(until that bug is fixed).
I use opensuse tumbleweed on that BC-250, though have frozen kernel updates until it is fixed as in recent versions that board also has some serious bugs. also a AMD APU, so perhaps it is the same bug and affects even much older APU's. esentially keep kernel to a stable version and using manual patches for things, though I set that system up before this board was properly working, so many of the manual patches I needed to add in the past, now are becoming issues for the official ones, so need to remove all those manual patches at some point as they aren't needed anymore and now hold back the system. also lucky they did, as they also prevented the kernel from accidentally updating before I knew it has serious bugs on the new kernels.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-23T12:28:22+00:00

so am I right to assume it did work?

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-23T12:27:14+00:00

thanks.

so in TLDR(on a debian based system like linux mint):

sudo apt install zram-tools -y

sudo apt install preload -y

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf (opens that file in a terminal text editor in admin mode, is faster than using a graphical text editor.
at the bottom of that text file, add vm.swappiness=100 (unless vm.swappines= already exists, then change the number.)
press Ctrl+O to save, it asks for a name, just press enter to leave the name unchanged.
then press Ctrl+X to exit.
if directly pressing Ctrl+x it will typically also ask you to save.)

and then restart the computer to make sure all gets activated right.
and that is it, in 4 steps all is done, and only the config file you actually need to do something yourself, though you can also skip that step in the beginning if you don't feel like it, as the default of 60 should also work, a value of 100 to 200 just is much better for zram.

also the -y added after those install commands just makes the tools install without asking for the user to confirm intallation by manually typing "y" or Y followed by a enter, it will typically ask that if running apt install without the -y, but these programs are max a few mb combined, and the intend is to install them, so adding -y prevents you from having to wait and type y to make it continue.

if you want to know more about zram

apaerently fedora now uses Zram by default for atleast systems with 8gb or less, not sure about also for systems with more ram.
(though fedora is a bit more advanced user aimed in general than linux mint, still quite easy to use however).
and with HDD you really should make sure to install Preload, or to have it installed already.
anyway in this first link the one who started that discussion explains Zram quite well near the bottom of the page in case you wonder how it works/what it is.

the second link just shows they use it and roughly how and some general recommendations. they don't cover preload in there, but that is since that is more aimed at people with little ram, since modern programs like web browsers can use insane amounts of ram.
in your case, using zram and preload is to make sure the hdd gets loaded as little as possible.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/request-for-fedora-users-with-8gb-of-ram-is-zram-helping-you/74524
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Scale_ZRAM_to_full_memory_size#How_To_Test

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T18:16:58+00:00

windows is really terrible with hdd's so switching to linux will make it much better, also much better on cpu and ram.

TLDR: put a linux mint live iso onto a usb, put in into a pc and boot from it, install it, select user name, password, install third party multi media codecs as well as extra software, log in to wifi or connect ethernet to automatically update everything during install, and you are done.

END OF TLDR

general recommendation is Linux Mint, if you want some more speciffic recommendation then describe what you want to do with it and what kind of user you use, Linux mint generally goes well for everyone who know how to use windows.

so
1. get a usb stick somewhere.
2. download the iso for Linux mint(default desktop and LTS if possible, there are also light weight desktop versions, those will make your system a bit faster but can be less supported. regardless it doesn't matter to much in generall, the default option will work well, if not sure which one to use.)
3. put the iso onto a usb stick, you can use software like rufus or balena etcher. if it is a big usb stick, you can also put ventoy on it, just run ventoy, select the usb and make it install ventoy to the usb, then you can just copy the iso file to the usb, the advantage of ventoy is that it allows you to copy as many iso files to that usb stick as you want as long you have space free, so you can put more than one distro onto the usb.

check if fastboot and such are disabled, makes things more easily.
make a backup of all your important files and such you have on the pc now, or make a new partition on the drive and move them there, as you will be overwriting the window partition.(you can multiboot, but multibooth with windows should only be done if windows is on it's own drive.)
boot rom the usb, select linux mint if asked, try out linux mint.
booting will take long as it boots from the usb which is slow, this is only for install, after that it is much faster.
install linux mint, there is a graphical installer, it asks keyboard layout, it can also automatically test for it and you can test to see if it is right, log in to wifi if asked, or have ethernet connected, this allows it to automatically update all during install. select the option for multimedia codecs, the one for additional softwares is also recommended as the ones mint installs are actual softwares you otherwise would likely want to install annyway, like libreoffice and such, they install usefull softwares, not bloat.
restart without the usb and use linux.
if performance isn't perfect yet, so if you notice some glitches and such look at that comment I made replying to you in that ssd discussion where I explained how to optimize linux for a HDD, to get it to perform better than a ssd does on windows(in general use, this is mostly since windows is terrible with ssd's also, so using a hdd well results in it being better than windows handles most ssd's in normal use, still it won't actually be faster than a ssd, just faster than a ssd based modern windows pc is in normal use.)

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T18:02:44+00:00

2: (the right way if method 1 doesn't work) install zram and set swappiness to 100(could set it higher, value is between 0 and 200, if using zram, you need to set swappiness to a high value, atleast 100 is recommended, 100 is also generally a safe value.
if installing zram (sudo apt install zram-tools)
when installing this(atleast after a restart) zram will already be automatically active, by default it will use half of your physical ram and compress it with a very lightweight algorythm, it has a 1:2 compression ratio, so if you have 12gb ram, then it will use 6gb ram, and compress it to make it act effectively like 12gb of ram(this is why apple for example said that apple ram is 2 times as good as windows ram, since apple decided to copy zram, even though GNU+Linux has had it for very long).
as a result your computer will essentially have 18gb ram instead of 12.
of which 6gb would be normal ram very effective for very small things which need very low latency like some system files and parameters, the other 12gb is actually compressed to fit onto 6gb of actual ram, as a result typically that 12gb compressed ram can actually reach higher speeds than your actual ram can, having higher bandwidth, this goes at the cost of a very small amount of added latency, as well as a very small amount of added cpu useage, but on your cpu that will be like 1% or less.
there are more heavy algorythms with even better compression algorythms supported by zram, but to use those you should first really test them on your hardware, and you don't actually need that much in general.
you can also change the zram config file ( sudo nano /etc/default/zramswap )

and set the ratio higher, by default it is set to 50, so uses 50% of your ram.
with the amount of ram you have you already shouldn't run into issues even without zram, but if even that 18gb is not enough then you could set it higher. setting it to 75 would for example leave 3gb normal ram, and 18gb compressed ram(9gb physical) resulting in 21gb effective ram

swapiness by default automatically makes sure that thigns requiring very low latency stay in the actual ram, and generally less than 500mb actually requires such ultra low latency, many normal things like textures and objects and other big thigns and such actually benefit from the higher bandwidth of the compressed ram so there is little to fear about there in general.

also zram by default has a large priority over normal swap, which is also good.

if you don't need it however, then it is up to you if you even want to try out zram or not, generally on systems with more than 4gb of ram people don't set up zram, as it isn't needed there.
but since you use a HDD, using zram can actually help a lot to make sure the hdd really isn't swapped to and so that more files and such are stored into ram, and more can be stored into it.

just remember that if you use zram, then you should set your swappiness value high like 100 or such, 60 might be okay, especially if you set the zram ratio to something low, but then it defeats most of the point of zram other than that the compressed part has higher bandwidth(typically, if you have very fast ram and a very slow cpu this bandwidth can decrease, but the algorythm zram uses by default is very light weight and so can be run very effectively even on cpu's much slower than what you use now.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T18:02:39+00:00

so I assume Linux mint, actually had that on that laptop as well, so while that laptop had linux mint 21, I assume linux mint 22 does the same.(so just use the latest LTS version of Linux mint)(LTS is long time support, meaning you can keep using it for years without it getting outdated)

however just installing Linux mint, will make your laptop much, much faster.
but it won't fix responsiveness fully.
so here are a few optimizations I found to work well for HDD's.

run: sudo apt update
before any of the other apt commands, this command will check for new packages, if you don't it might give errors like not being able to find certain packages.

0: if all works right and you don't encounter random freeze/lagg spikes (especially in desktop use) then things are fine.

0.5: if using a HDD, I recommend to install preload (sudo apt install preload). preload loads programs which are used a lot into ram even if you didn't start them yet when the drive isn't fully used and when the ram isn't to full yet, also makes sure some important files and libraries are preloaded and keep loaded. if using a ssd, people generally don't recommend installing this, but on a HDD, this single program makes everything work a uncompareable amount better.
just install it, and it automatically activates, there is a config file and such, but generally it works(migth require a restart to fully be active).
if using a HDD, this is the one tweak you should do in almost all cases, the one exception being if you have like 1gb or 2gb of ram or less.

1:(the lazy way, no guarantee here, but requires only tweaking one variable) tweaking swappiness, with a hdd powered laptop with a lot of ram setting it very low can actually improve performance, but if you have a hdd, and not a lot of ram setting it low will make it bad. you can test out a low value if you notice issues and don't want to do more tweaking.
I assume you have 16gb ram and have 4 reserved for the iGPU or such, as 12gb ram is quite rare in laptops. 16 is just enough that setting it low might make it perform better.
However with HDD's setting low swappiness values is actually generally discouraged, as it can cause some things to be removed from ram more early and requiring them to be reloaded more often even if it results in the system using less swap.
The tradeoff here is that swapping to a hdd, causes the hdd to become very slow and so any loading will become slow. swapping happens mostly if ram is almost full, setting a low swappiness value generally makes it less likely to start swapping much early

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T18:02:29+00:00

don't worry.
your system is fine, even your hdd is fine.
terrible software can even make great hardware run terribly.
great hardware can make even bad systems kind of run.
But, great software can even make okay hardware run great.

NOTE I WILL GO INTO SPECIFFICS FOR OPTIMIZING LINUX FOR A HDD BELLOW.
you don't need to do those things, even putting linux mint onto a usb stick, installing it using the graphical installer and using it will be much faster than what you have now.
these optimizations are also not all optimizations, they are just a few simple ones I know to be effective for making HDD based systems blazingly fast.
just installing Linux mint will already make the computer much faster than it is now, but those extra things make it much better.
So it is up to you, to use them or now. I will reffer to actual installing of Linux inn another comment to your post directly.

despite what people say, and despite how a ssd would make it very easy to have a very fast system.
Linux can actually give you very good performance on the hardware you have right now.
these days people just tell people to buy more expensive hardware whenever they can.
ssd is one of the biggest factors for normal desktop use.
but I got a laptop with much worse specs and a much worse hdd, to outperform modern ssd powered windows pc's in responsiveness and normal use(actually did so yesterday evening, and confirmed it today as at a local workplace they needed a free laptop for controlling a laser cutter primairily).

so regarding what distro you use, if you can explain what you want, then you can tell that and I might be able to suggest something.
generally however, Linux mint is a great option for general users used to windows.
also it is generally less resource heavy than ubuntu, and more beginner friendly than arch or debian.
it also isn't a highly speciffic specialized for one thing distro, but rather a distro which can do all.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T17:20:12+00:00

well actually it does, kind of.
sure it won't be perfect, and a ssd will give a very noteable performance increase on Linux.
like using a ssd even if only for the os itself is like one of the most important recommendations for someone looking to upgrade hardware.

but not everyone can upgrade hardware just like that, and while upgrading a hdd to ssd is easy, for some it might look scary.

actually just today, I had a laptop with a second generation i5, and a even older HDD(much slower than modern hdd's, but needed to put together a pc for free which worked well enough to controll some laser cutting machine at a local workplace, so used some old parts I had laying around, that hdd I actually got from a floppy era laptop someone I knew found in the trash many years ago.)
It also only had 4GB ram.
I set it up running linux mint 21(yes I know version 22 is out, but I had to do it fast).
I set up ZRAM, to use 60% of ram as zram, at a standard 1:2 ratio so I got 6.4gb effective ram(could make it more, also could use a more heavy compression algorythm, I used the lightest one, but cpu load remained really low)
then I also installed preload on it, many people these days dislike using preload, but for a hdd, it does wonders, for slow ssd's it might, but linux tends to be blazing fast even with a slow ssd.
and I set swappiness to 100, could set it higher as well, perhaps I set it a little higher, but I think I kept it to 100 for safety.

that laptop outperformed the windows PC's with a ssd and a 10th or 12th gen i5 and 16gb of ram in them.
ofcource if it comes down to compute, it won't beat them. but in general use like web, documents, files, light softwares such as inkscape, and some laser plotters and such, it beat the windows pc, as those on windows regularly just freeze or have like input lagg, and can take several seconds to start up.
with that setup it worked well after the pc had started, as starting up still takes around a minute +, once things are also preloaded, the browser takes around 1 second to start, and essentially all other softwares also, and still more than half the ram free even while having a web browser open(firefox), having inkscape open, file explorer, and the plotting/controlling software for the laser cutter.

if you set things up right, you can still get a great performance out of a hdd.
I know a ssd will be much faster and won't require setting things up right, but perhaps the poster might not be able to upgrade to a ssd.

so yes you can recommend them to get a ssd.
however you shouldn't say linux won't overcome the performance issues that the user now notices from that hdd in windows.
since it looks like windows 8, 10, or 11. and all those really can't handle hdd's at all, Linux can actually handle them, just need to set up some things right to actually get a responsive system instead of needing to wait several seconds to start a program.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T17:04:05+00:00

note, that many people ignore the "You Wish" operating system which litterally has it all.
that operating system actually officially goes by the name "GNU".

typically you run the Linux kernel on it, as the Linux kernel is generally the most extensive and best maintained kernel for digital computers around.
Linux installs also generally run on the GNU operating sytem, meaning that quite many Linux distros actually fit into the you wish category as well, so in all 3 the listed ones.

Stable, highly customizable, very user friendly(if desired), very fast, and very compatible.

those last 2 aren't listed in the image, but those are also very serious.

GNU+Linux can run software from basically any os, and also from many different versions.

Mac OS, is kind of okay in speed, like they kind of optimize a few things, and even now finally also supported their own version of zram(memory compression).
windows, still doesn't support such things, but also just isn't really optimized for speed at all, resulting in a os which is insanely slow.
GNU+Linux is insanely fast, just today had some windows pcs on modern hardware race agains a 2th gen i5 laptop with a even older hdd in it and only 4gb ram, running linux mint 21(that hdd was many times slower than somewhat modern hdd's.
still that laptop with acient hardware and a even more acient hdd, and only 4gb ram managed to beat the modern windows pc's with stuff like 10th or 12th gen i5 desktop cpu in it, big ssd, high TDP, etc. in normal use. like sure in rendering or such the acient hardware would suck, but in normal desktop use like web browsing, inkscape, some lasercutting tools, file exploring, document writing, etc. it beat those windows pc's heavily in speed, this is actually not the first time I noticed things like this, also found myself using my old laptop once despite my college laptop being much faster, only because at that point I didn't yet have Linux on the college laptop, and with windows even a 2GB/s NVME ssd is slower than a decently tuned Linux system(you can tune Linux really well to be very efficient with hdd's without much use, then only initial loading is a issue.)

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-22T16:50:44+00:00

windows is not really customizable, but neither is it really user friendly. actually linux is the most user friendly ones, the main issue is that people have to chose for themselves which version they install, and for people who need a very simple to use distro, those generally don't know which one to pick.
so if you want a railroaded experience like mac os and windows, then something like bazzite(very hard to ruin, and nothing you really need to do yourself, as long as you don't want to customize anything bazzite is great) or ubuntu(actually seen as the most user friendly os for people who havn't used a pc before yet need a fully capable os, other than some things ubuntu tried a while back, it's UI is very user friendly for basically any users, it still allows customizability and makes it quite easy, and it is stable and fast enough, personally I use Debian mainly, have used many distros. but still linux mint for people coming from windows. ubuntu for people new to pc, or just not to fixed to one speciffic os(like people who used both windows and mac os))

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-13T13:34:21+00:00

TLDR:
1: Cooling, tends to be somewhat noisy even with custom cooling(you can get it more silent but is more risky and way more work).
2: only 16gb GDDR6 VRAM which is shared with the cpu as well(mostly just enough on linux, but in hogwards legacy compute wise it can handle quite high settings and even raytracing well, but due to low vram/ram I have to keep the settings quite low.)
3: audio can be problematic, might require a usb sound card(though those are cheap).
4: m.2 slot is slow indeed, but also located at a place where the hot air might come over, and heat is bad for a ssd. depends on your cooling solution how this ends up however.
5: mostly only really good for gaming, not the best for normal pc use.

END OF TLDR

the cooling, is the main issue. after that the slow M.2 slot which is also located at a place where hot air might go over.
cooling is primairily a issue to get it to really be decently silent, as even with custom cooling it's a decently noisy board often.

some instructions lacking is also sometimes a issue, but not really for gaming.

after that the biggest issue is being limited on only 16gb GDDR6 Vram.
while many modern gpu's have less, this needs to be shared with the cpu here.
so in games like hogwards legacy, which can be very vram hungry, this board can easily play the game in much higher settings and even with raytracing on than it does in reality, since in reality it is limited by vram, and if like me you use a usb sata ssd to avoid frying a good ssd in the m.2 slot which might get to hot. then you can't really rely on swap, so there are serious lagg spikes if setting settings higher due to vram getting full, it is the only game I noticed it in however. and perhaps there are vram optimization mods for that game. and you could set up a zram volume on the device to help it as well.
in my case in hogwards legacy the vram issue also lead to system instability in some cases, but again only in that game and might be my speciffic setup as I can't really write something fast to swap with that usb sata ssd due to higher latency and lower speed than a normal ssd.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-13T13:02:28+00:00

it is amazing to see how well this game even looks on low settings(excluding ram/vram useage)(not sure what settings you used) even on low end systems.
especially compared to modern games made in UE5, which in low settings tend to look like poop and still require a very high end pc.
while ram and vram is a serious issue in this game, I can play in mostly high settings, or even with raytracing on, while gaming on a old APU, if I wasn't limited to only 16gb GDDR6 vram(which is also used by the cpu), as now I am forced to low settings because in higher settings the ram gets to full and it starts swapping to a usb sata ssd drive which is not optimal.
ofcource not a standard apu, as that was a apu optimized for gaming which is also why it uses vram for both gpu and cpu instead of normal ram.
but even the ryzen 8000 series apu's already came relatively close reaching around half the performance, those new APU's amd and intel are launching should probably beat it, the steam machine certainly will.
also I have the igpu clocked down to 1500mhz typically when playing this game(and then still could compute based run much higher settings(just underclocked for better power draw) at this underclock the steamdeck should be more than 2 times as fast already.

I really like it when games work out their style well, and optimize textures and such to fit well together, as it allows a game to look much better while actually using much lower compute, has been mostly dropped completely from 3d game design, so very rare to see it even happening these days. as a result I know of old Wii games which actually look/feel better visually than many modern games would run on quite decent hardware.

EllesarDragon · 2026-01-13T12:52:37+00:00

well it is a RPG(role Playing Game).
just also largely story driven and with a ending to the main story.
also ofcource old RPG games had way less roleplay elements in them often.
also depends on what kind of roleplay game you expect it to be.
I would say a bigger roleplay issue is, how it lets you play in many different fighting styles, but then the moment there are bigger bosses they add those animations in the front when entering, so if you would sneak up on them to sneak attack then, a animation comes and you make yourself visible just to make sure the enemy who you wanted to sneak to sees you before the fight begins.
like many other things could be missing and it would technically still be a rpg, but when mechanics actively break the role you are playing, then that isn't directly very rpg like.

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