• 1 Post
  • 56 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • Well… sort of.

    Batteries perform differently under load. A battery that delivers 10Wh under a 1W load will probably deliver less (and get warmer) under a 10W load. Power supplies also perform differently under load, and DC-DC switching power supplies perform differently based on the output voltage. Generally, a larger voltage conversion and/or a higher load is less efficient. There’s also going to be some base power consumption in the circuit, so the most output power is probably achieved at some sort of medium load.

    To make things more fun, batteries are usually tested under constant current, not constant power. The increasing current as the battery drains of a constant power load will result in less total power, and constant output power often means increasing input power as the battery drains.

    In short, the real world is complicated. Giving best and worst case Watt-hours could be a reasonable approach.



  • Powerbanks are where it’s most problematic. They’re usually reporting the capacity of the battery cells in mAh. Those cells will be at 2.8-4.2V during operation, but the powerbank outputs 5V, or in modern powerbanks some higher number. 5000 mAh at the 3.6V average of the cells during discharge is certainly not 5000 mAh at the 9V it’s giving to my phone.

    It’s not going to give my phone 2000 mAh @ 9V or 18 Wh as the math would suggest either because it’s well below 100% efficient. I’m not sure what’s reasonable to demand in terms of advertising here since efficiency will vary with output voltage and output wattage.








  • Kind of defeats the purpose

    That’s why the why matters. Some people might just not trust Windows to keep private data secure, but be comfortable running certain software on it in a VM, possibly a VM that isn’t usually allowed network access.

    If you’re sufficiently motivated to get off Windows to invest time learning different workflows, there certainly are options. It sounds like you’ve tried some for image processing and found gaps. People might be able to help fill them if you go into detail about your current workflow, but there is no 1:1 replacement for Photoshop on any platform. If you’re a heavy Photoshop user, there may be no path to happiness for you.

    There’s surely a 1:1 replacement for Visual Studio outside of Windows-specific development (which wouldn’t make much sense to attempt on Linux anyway).


  • Zak@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlHelp me like desktop linux
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    16 days ago

    I really want this to work out.

    Why?

    I don’t ask that to talk you out of it. I like desktop Linux. I’m typing this on desktop Linux. I’ve been using desktop Linux for most of my adult life. I ask because your reasons will inform the advice people can give you.

    I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing [with Windows-specific proprietary software]

    There isn’t necessarily a good solution to this. Those are large, complicated programs with very deep workflows that are almost certainly going to be dissimilar in any substitute software, which is itself going to be large and complicated with its own ways of doing things. Using those specific programs may be more important to you than what OS you run them on.

    It looks like Photoshop is probably usable with Wine, while Visual Studio isn’t. Using Wine means putting up with occasional instability and reduced performance. If you spend a lot of time in Photoshop, this may not be for you.

    Another option is to run Windows in a VM for those apps. This will likely work smoothly with regard to the apps themselves, and generally performs near native, but does mean a less polished interaction with the rest of your desktop.


  • If you’re patient and want to gain a deeper understanding, try Arch itself rather than an Arch-based distribution that’s easy to install.

    You’ll spend a long time on the initial installation and setup and you’ll read a lot of documentation in the process. When you have a usable system, you’ll understand what’s installed, how it’s configured, and why. Expect to spend a couple days just to get it usable though - this approach isn’t for everyone.

    The Arch docs are top tier, but they’re not necessarily step by step guides because there’s more than one way you might choose to set things up. The docs tell you how the pieces can fit together, but it’s ultimately up to you to to do the assembly.


  • With ten finger typing, having the most-used keys on the home row is a significant advantage for speed and ergonomics. With swiping, having a sequence of characters close to each other makes it hard for the algorithm to predict the intended word. With tapping, it’s a disadvantage to have adjacent characters in a sequence on a small touchscreen because it increases the chance of fat-fingering them.