No, it has not „always been fine” - I’ve worked with people who disabled auto updates on their dev machines just to keep a specific kernel & driver version working together. Circa 2016 :)

Counter-counter point: people don’t get a Mac or windows laptop to learn about osx or windows. They generally want to run software or at least browser to do what they need to do.

Uh, memory metrics in Linux are a pain. The only tool that reports most cached as available is htop. free, top and a lot of other software (like node_exporter) will report that a lot of cached memory is not available.

To OP: don’t worry, a lot of Linux tools are smart enough to give back memory if memory pressure rises.

This. Well put.

…and then you learn that packageX v1 is not maintained anymore and relies through a deep set of dependencies on a seriously vulnerable package (in a version which is also not maintained anymore).

Sorry, I had a pretty eventful December :)

This is not an unusual comment section on Phoronix, to put it mildly.

I use a usff Lenovo thinkcentre m97p with external hdds for media. It has 4th-gen i5 (2 cores) and 8GB of ram. If I don’t use transcoding, it’s perfectly capable. For transcoding it would depend on the media :) I only stream fullhd.