Nice, thanks a lot, especially the dirty_bytes settings are interesting to me, because I experience hangs with too much disk IO :-P.

Cheers!

Could you ELI5 the last five settings? I saw that Chrome OS sets vm.overcommit_memory = 1, it seems to make sense but is missing here.

Thanks a lot! You are right, I saw this already.

I can confirm the findings with my benchmarks: zstd has the best compression, lz4 is the fastest.

To my understand it is swap read-ahead, and the number is a power for the base 2. This means the default reads 2^3 = 8 pages ahead. According to what I read, the default of 3 was set in the age of rotating discs and never adapted for RAM swap devices.

Thank you for your answer and your insights.

In my unscientific tests, sysctl/vm.page-cluster made a measurable difference (15% faster when setting it to 0), and it seems everyone else (PopOS, ChromeOS) tweaks at least this setting with ZRAM. I would assume the engineers at PopOS/ChromeOS also did some benchmarks before using this settings.

Now I really would be interested, if you would measure a difference on your 1gb potato SBCs, because IMHO it should even have a bigger impact for them. (Of course, your workload/use cases might make any difference irrelevant, and of course potato SBCs have other bottlenecks like WiFi/IO, which might make this totally irrelevant.

Good points, but again: I would assume advertisers track/fingerprint you anyway, so we are not speaking about getting anonymized information from Mozilla but IMHO we are speaking about getting one more data point about you, which is easy to de-anonymize in combination with the rest of the information known about you.

Fair question. First move for Mozilla: Fire the whole fucking leadership team and use the millions saved for some more developers working on Firefox. That should finance the next 2 years, afterwards we can think about next steps. :-P

Way to go. Does this solution help with fingerprinting/tracking?

This helps you not seeing ads, it does not help you being tracked.

• Concerning advertisement: I want the option to pay for content for myself, I do not want or intent to force this on other users. Although Netflix is moving in a bad direction, in the past I could pay their service and watch a movie/show w/o advertisement. I totally would not mind if Netflix lets me pay a reasonable amount and give other users the option to have a free, advertisement based plan.
• One related fact: Even payed newspapers etc. since the start of the industries always relied on money from advertisement, there was AFAIK never an outlet which could survive on subscriptions/payed readers alone
• Fair point about Mozilla not selling your data. But when you phrase it like this, Alphabet/Meta etc. are also not really selling your data (which is their golden goose, after all). I’ll still correct this.

Ask yourself: Has Firefox even the expertise/man power to pull this off in a secure way or not? I’d rather have Google collect data, because they know how to protect their crown jewels and have a track record.

Mozilla demonstrated in the last decade that most of their projects are failures and they have neither the expertise nor manpower to pull something like this off.

In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.

For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.

As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.

If Firefox would get forked by some developers I’ll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.

… as already mentioned above:

1. This will be just an additional data point about you sold out - no advertiser will dial back on all the other ways to collect data about you.
2. Mozilla shows that it willingly and silently will sell your data out and they will increase this over time to make money/try to be the man in the middle.
3. It does not matter at all if it affects ad blocking solutions, this is about tracking and profiling. Learn about browser fingerprinting and other techniques.
4. This is built in to your browser, which is crossing a very important line.

advertising isn’t going to go away

That is certainly true for the moment, but IMHO that is not really an argument in this case:

1. Advertisement can simply show me me some advertisement w/o spying on me. (Effectiveness of targeted advertisement is AFAIK highly controversial anyway.)
2. My operating system does not have to spy on me and my browser certainly not.
3. Mozillas BS arguments are just the ‘story told’, obviously they want to make money via advertisement and be the man-in-the-middle. I assume it is their legal right to do so and they can pursue the business model they like, but I do not have to like it.
4. Again, advertisers will simply use this as an additional source of information about users for real time bidding, and not wind down other methods of information gathering, so this is only bad for me w/o any upsides.
5. Mozilla is showing it is willing to sell it’s user data out this way (and silently do so), what are the next steps, what will happen with the next updates?

… and I happily have donated and will donate/pay money to/for websites and software I like/use and will happily accept business models dying which depend on selling my data out.

One of the main points of using Open Source operating systems and software is, that I have the freedom to use my own hardware the way I like w/o being up-sold or harassed by advertisement.

… first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.

Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.

So, serious question: How is this good for me?

Edit: typo

Nice one, although I am sorry for your shitty experience with the employer. We should have a world wide open database about employers pulling this kind of shit!

Define great. ;-)

KMail has multiple issues, which are known for a very long time. It might work for some people, but for me Evolution and Thunderbird work 100% OOTB with all my email accounts, which is and has not been true with KMail, not even speaking about KMail corrupting local email storage etc.

If you look only at the comments under the linked article, multiple people expressed having problems with KMail…

IMHO this is a really big problem: Most of my life depends on my email client working correctly and w/o a hitch: Reminders for appointments, communication for all purposes, important emails etc. KMail really ‘earned’ its bad reputation in the last years, which I am not happy about.

KMail has filtering rules. IMHO the problem is more about stability and other known issues with KMail.

Funnily enough, I cannot remember having to find emails older than a few days/weeks, so for work email, I could probably delete all emails older than 6 month or a year. OTOH, better safe than sorry. I only delete emails with big attachments and simply archive the rest.

I’ll even save important emails in project folders, just in case and it is nice being able to have some emails right at hand w/o searching.

Using Evolution for nearly a decade now.

Cannot say anything about using it with a Yubikey.

Concerning Evolution: It never let me down, always worked and is comparatively lightweight.

Thunderbird was quite slow/heavy/memory hungry many years back. KMail ate my emails, failed at integration of GMail accounts etc etc etc. In the past I also liked Sylpheed, but AFAIK it doesn’t have any OAUTH support etc. by now.

When nothing big changes, I guess only Thunderbird and Evolution are good investments, because they seem to be the only clients which are stable now and have enough users/active developers to not disappear randomly.