I'm an educator, and my Windows PC crashed during my first period class.

I had a cinnamon mint USB drive in my bag. I booted to it, and it saved the day!

I don't have anybody to tell just how much of a godsend that was, but I figured you guys might appreciate it!

If so, why? I'm genuinely curious. I have never encountered anyone who runs it.

I'm a programmer by trade with twenty years of experience, having first used Linux in 2004 (iirc), and I thought I knew the game pretty well. There are CPU-bound tasks, memory-bound tasks, network-bound tasks, and disk-bound tasks. I'm doing async programming and it's working fine, offloading i/o to the kernel while my app is doing cpu stuff. Except, I'm now using a laptop with 8 GB of memory and Linux Mint-Cinammon on HDD as my main machine, and somehow shit is constantly in the swap and waits for the disk. Right now I'm moving a Windows partition, I have quit everything except four Firefox tabs, Emacs, and Double Commander — and I still think I might kill myself before the ordeal is over. The entire system is completely and totally fucked. Barely anything moves, nothing responds in any kind of a timely fashion. Emacs freezes when typing, with two open buffers. Audio playback stutters. VPN is nonresponsive. I closed all the hundreds of buffers in Emacs, I set the priority and io priority of Gparted to the minimum, and the other apps to the max. I set swappiness to zero, and turned off the swap altogether with swapoff. All of this barely helps. I'm drunk right now, and still this affair bugs me beyond measure. I could maybe deal with this as a one-time thing if swapping and disk i/o weren't incapacitating the system every day.

Is Linux kernel so ridiculously single-threaded that any i/o cripples the entire thing? Or is something tuned horribly wrong in Mint by default? Can I unfuck this somehow? I live close to a river, I can't take this much temptation.

With the recent GN video I'd been wondering about turning an old mini PC from eBay into a little Linux TV box for streaming. I'd need access to Android apps (I guess through Waydroid).

After a brief look, it seems that the two options are some form of LibreElec system running Kodi or Arch running Plasma Big Screen. Any thoughts / advice? And if I went for Big Screen, does anyone know of any distros that ship with it or will I have to spin it up myself on Arch?

https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects

https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

I highly suggest this app, especially on old pc with limited speakers or bad microphones. Even when you have good speakers is still great for any limited audio streams (podcasts/videos/web radio), the "Crystalizer" option does wonders.

Easy Effects is an advanced audio manipulation tool. It includes an equalizer, limiter, compressor and a reverberation tool, just to mention a few. To complement this there is also a built in spectrum analyzer. Easy Effects is the successor to PulseEffects. Easy Effects only supports PipeWire's audio server. PulseAudio users should instead use PulseEffects. Because Easy Effects uses the default PipeWire sound server it will work with most, if not all, applications you use. All supported applications are presented in the main window, where each can be enabled individually. Easy Effects is able to apply effects to an input device, such as a microphone. This is, for example, useful in audio recording, but it also works well during voice conversations.