Conservative Political Forum

Back story. My first "computer" was a TI-994a, which was quickly (6 years) followed by my own 80286/12 build with 640K of RAM. I set this stage to one tell how long I've been playing at the component level, but also to show the processor models I started upon.

For the longest time I would just swap the CPU, motherboard, RAM, video card, and modem to refresh my system. Apple had a cool (an now ironic) commercial warning us about Big Brother, look who's welcomed the title today. Since Apple was not on my radar, I started varying CPU's with the horrible release of the AMD Thunderbird. Quickly I returned to the Intel lineup. In 2000 I purchased my first Mac, I followed this in 2006 with the Mac Pro. In the Apple line I've owned the Macbook, three Mac Minis, two iMac's and the entry config Mac Pro Garbage Can. I recently switched back to the Intel lineup, and did so largely for file ownership, the ability to run Zorin as my OS, virtual machines, and CAD power. Currently I'm running an Intel Core i7 10700 CPU (no need to overclock), the ASUS ROG Strix Z-490-H motherboard, Samsung 970 EVO 1Tb SSD, and 32 Gb of Corsair Vengeance LPX ddr4 3600 RAM.

All of this is a lead in to explain why my interest does not rise at all for the new Intel Rocket Lake CPU. Not only is the new CPU still a 14nm process, the flagship CPU has fewer cores, and has come up as a slower CPU in a handful of benchmarks. Intel continues to fail at having any success in matching AMD's 10nm Ryzen CPU line up, and they have been trying for at least 5 years. So how does Intel decided to solve this design and implementation issue? They half the size of all processors and drop to a 7nm production philosophy. My education is Electrical Engineering, and one bane of my existence was to down size circuitry while maintaining manageable heat scaling, and finding reliable components that matched my design requirements. I never spent a day in chip fabrication, and was largely in portable components, all the way up to data center design and implementation. As such, I don't understand the actuals of dye size reduction beyond the theory, but even so, I cannot imagine that halving the size of a dye is less complicated and in anyway easier than reduction of the dye by an increment of almost a third?

This brings me to this article and the continuation of failures by Intel.

 https://www.pcgamer.com/rocket-lake-proves-intel-is-broken/

While an article written in November of 2020 would seldom find any relevance almost 6 months later (thanks to Moore's Law and tech turnover), but in this case it is almost if not more relevant. For years we've been promised the death of x86 architecture, and Apple was going to be that final nail. Then, low and behold, Apple adopts and incorporates the intel CPU line up. Now Apple is ramping up and up-revving the M1 line. Even so, all the M1 is going to do is possibly swing a few fence sitters, but if that very small group does stitch, they will come back to either a MS or Linux OS, if for no other reason than file ownership.

If, and I think it is more likely now than every before, the little engine that could (AMD) might be the company that drives the nail into Intel's coffin, if not relegates them to a early 2000's position once held by AMD as second fiddle.

If you're tired of Microsoft, Google, Apple and all of the other privacy breeches, and if you have an old system sitting around, you might give Zorin OS a shot. It is laid out very similar to Windows, but is a Linux variant, and adds several layers of security and protection's that Windows, Android (think Chrome), and Apple spend all day selling to AI data stores. If you're an Apple fan Linux has a solution for you too. Elementary OS is an Apple look alike, with far better file management. I have an older system set up with elementary, but I find Zorin much more to my liking.

Done Geeking for now.

I'm a Technician class, so I somewhat understand the challenges. Linux (in this case Zorin - based upon Ubuntu) is a low-power OS, and will run on older hardware, as well as the newest platforms. It is (in my experience) faster than Windows 10 Pro, and aside from the apps, equally capable. Where it falls short on Windows apps, it excels with ANYTHING LINUX. My system is as up-to-date as anything sold in the big box stores dedicated to gaming, and I'm not a gamer. It is water-cooled, so I lose some of the temperature displays that Coolermaster wrote for Windows, but there are Linux apps that do the same and more. Most of the common apps are all web-based, so things like Office 365, Adobe, net monitoring, anything IP based, the two CAD apps I run, and so much more lives within some Data Center somewhere (the Clod, as I like to call it). I run both OneDrive, and iCloud from within the Brave browser, and have Tor on the system too. I also have PureVPN, and while it says it is installed, I cannot find it to launch when I need it (my issue I'm certain). Since so many in our Ham world write their own apps and functions from within the Linux environment, it seems to me that Zorin would be an excellent fit.

I've been running it for almost a full month now, and the only thing I have any issues with is printing. Zorin sees my HP Office Jet Pro 9015, and prints to it, but it does so at about 1/4 the speed as if from Windows. Even though I've been in the tech and engineering world for almost 34 years, the only thing I'm certain of is that I don't know everything, and I still make mistakes (OE58 = Operator Error). That being the case, I suspect my printer issues are self-induced, and based upon my relative ignorance of the new platform. So far I've not been a paying sponsor, but I consider my dry run complete, so I will be sponsoring the folks who put in the time and effort to put out this Distro. For the basic version of Windows 10 Home it is $140, so I'm going to commit $70 to Zorin's effort. I used to write AV for John McAfee when he was Shareware, and John got rich off of $1-5 donations. As a guy who still does DBA and software dev stuff, I know how painful it is to take trickle donations. I'm not in that starter category anymore but appreciate the guys who are on the street and doing the work. 

If there is any speculation that I develop for, or have any association with Zorin beyond my using it as my primary OS, I do not, never have, and will not going forward. There is a chance that I will write and compile future Linux-based apps, but they will be as a service side for people doing podcasts, or putting video in or on hosting services.

https://zorinos.com/  This is their site, and they can provide more answers than I will ever be able too, but don't let that stop you from fielding questions. If I don't know, I'll tell you, and even do some digging if it's a self-serving topic.

You just educated me on an aspect of Zorin. I was of the impression that it was donation-based, and your calling out the $34 motivated me to look deeper. I just completed the purchase and download of Ultimate, although my costs were $39. Regardless, I was happy not to have to go fishing for a way to fund their development. I'm not a gamer, so that aspect of Ultimate does me no good, but the fact they have integrated all of the other apps at the Zorin kernel level is exciting. No performance enhancements with the upgrade, but it does support a much deeper hardware pool, and extends the timeline of older equipment even beyond that of Core or Lite.

Hope you enjoy it, and find similar successes.

You will be surprised by the ease, accuracy and speed of the Zorin install. I have so much going on with selling the house, getting the vault walk through ready (already moved out two safes, and the other one stays), so I did not get a chance to bring my system up on Ultimate.

I have certain arms that have to stay with me under two locked barriers, due to my bond and Fed licensure, which is and always has been a pain in the ass. Property of my corporation, but I'm the custodian, and legally liable for any runaway convict firearms; yeah right.

Your system history predates mine, but I am familiar with CPM. My into was with TI Basic. In college it was Machine, Assembly, Fortran, COBOL, C/C++, SQL, MATLAB (Engineering of course). Later it was VB, HTML, Perl, CGI, Python, C sharp, REXX, JAVA, PHP, and Swift (but I think Apple has a terminal shelf life, and Apple wants to much control, so I dropped that turd). I tried to write in a few others, but the aforementioned were the ones I spent any time learning and producing output from or within.

Your systems and power draws are impressive. 10 year old systems did not know power efficiency, so hopefully you have updated power supplies. There are so many companies making quality power supplies now that have amazing power efficiencies, that unless you a loading the CPU, most scale power to the point the largest draw at idle are some people's LED's cycling through color schemes. I used to swear by Thermaltake and Cooler Master, but recently ran across a supply made by Be Quiet called Straight Power, and found the 750W version to be in the sweet spot. Great motherboard integration (depending upon the motherboard and available headers), with a lot of power mgmt options at the BIOS level.

As far as engineering a system for the best speed, I found over the last couple of years if I get the CPU and the RAM at or about the same speed, little else helps to increase performance. For me SSD's and M.2 NVMe drives/flash storage are a must. I run the Samsung EVO 970, and as soon as they release the EVO 990 Pro I'll be laying out the cash for it. XPG just released a SX8200 Pro 2TB 3D NAND with 3500 Mbs reads, and 3000 Mbs writes, which is the same as expected from the 990, but I trust Samsung far more than XPG. Living in the computer world is always bleeding edge, which used to be the way we described computer cases in the late 80's (they would cut you like a Ginsu), but bleeding edge this morning is a week behind by 5 pm the same day.

Y'all done anything with Hamnet?

http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/

I tried to... about 8-10yrs ago, but interest in my area was nil.
Had 2 dish antennas, a couple of Cisco routers, ready to flash, had a clear line of site to the next guy ... no real interest, the project just fell flat.

It'll get some serious attention in areas where Internet is really poor or completely down, like after an hurricane.