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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It should, with careful and precise setup (all needed modules built into the kernel, everything locally compiled, USE flags for all packages carefully chosen to eliminate unnecessary dependencies), be the most targeted for the specific hardware it’s running on and the specific workload it’s doing—in other words, it would be carrying less cruft around. Fewer libraries to import, fewer branches to check during code execution.

    In other words, execution time should be a bit better in return for spending more setup time. Benchmarks like this tend to only measure execution time.






  • If you can. Medical devices are particularly nasty: there may be only one or two brands on the market that do what you need, because such devices understandably require extensive certification. If the only available option requires an app, you’re stuck. If you need something that meets other legal or professional certification requirements, you might also have very limited options.

    For just about anything else, I agree that there’s probably some alternative to an app-locked device, although some level of convenience tradeoff may be necessary.





  • A lot of Broadcom cards are supported, so you either have a missing driver/firmware blob or some really bad luck.

    Historically, phone line modems were very often unsupported (some people may remember the term “winmodem”), but hardly anyone uses them anymore, so the problem has effectively gone away. Older consumer-grade printers that didn’t speak Postscript, ditto. I own a very old TV capture card of the analog type that has never been supported, but probably won’t work with modern Windows either.

    Modern hardware is more likely to be supported unless it’s too niche to attract developers, or too bleeding-edge for its protocol to have been reverse-engineered yet.