You mean the spectre exploit? Weeee, that was fun!
Fixing it didn't slow processors down though. It just made them stop pretending they were magically fast. See, for a long time processors have been doing work they thought you would probably want while they waited for you to ask them to do something. They kept all the "user might need this" work in a sandbox, and when you made a choice they would pull your choice out of the sandbox and present it to you, so you would think, "Wow, this computer is BLAZING fast!"
Nobody was supposed to be able to use the stuff in the sandbox. Technically the stuff the processor kept in the sandbox didn't even really exist. But it turns out you CAN use it... and you can use it to access parts that those processes shouldn't even be able to access.
View attachment 238551
That is exactly what I was talking about.
I think out of all the OSes Linux Mint has the best updater. What do you think about that?
I like PCLinuxOS, but what I don't like about it is how much work I had to put into the distro before I got it running smooth.
Number 1) I had to change this or I couldn't use my external hard drives with it and Linux Mint.
By default, PCLinuxOS UIDs start at 500, while Linux Mint and almost every other distro, start at 1000.
Number 2) FIX SWAPPINESS: (This is controversial among linux users. But for my computers it works really well, so I do it.)
Create
/etc/sysctl.d/vm.swappiness.conf
vm.swappiness = 10
reboot
Number 3) ENABLE WRITE CACHING ON HARD DISKS
Edit /etc/sysconfig/harddisks and uncomment all the options and reboot. That should get you going. ;D
USE_DMA=1
MULTIPLE_IO=16
EIDE_32BIT=3
LOOKAHEAD=1
reboot
Number 4) FIX INTEL NOT CLEARING OUT CPU
How to check:
run these in terminal :
$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/current_driver
and
$ cat /sys/module/intel_idle/parameters/max_cstate
If the max_state is not 1 there could be the problem.
Edit /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet noiswmd nokmsboot resume=UUID=77894d14-fc4b-4535-b2f4-ad8e84d43f4b audit=0 vga=788 intel_idle.max_cstate=1
su
update-grub
reboot
On PCLinuxOS the software is slightly limited because they are against using System D. So anything that depends on System D, you can't use.
When it comes to updating PClinuxOS, Synaptic Package Manager is your best friend. Anything else, doesn't seem to have enough tools, to help you fix things if something goes wrong. Another tool you need is timeshift. Since this is a rolling distro, it is possible that things could get broken. One time something got updated, but not everything I needed. In order to get my sound working again I had to timeshift it back to an earlier time. Wait a day or so, and then re try the updating.
Another thing you like to have installed is dupeclean. It isn't installed by default, but sometimes if something goes wrong, you can end up with duplicate packages, that messes things up. When that happens dupeclean and dupeclean-gui is your friend.
This shouldn't scare you off from using it. Once you get it smoothed out the way you like it, it isn't hard to keep the distro stable. I haven't had any of the problems that I mentioned in nearly a year!