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Linux Desktop Environments System Usage
Over the years I've seen a lot of poorly made comparisons of Linux Desktop Environments in terms of system usage and in this article I want to make things right once and for all.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery
I got the chance to investigate an interesting bug in SerenityOS this week. It was related to the decoding of JPG images in the operating system. For some reason, when a JPG image is viewed, it comes out like this: Lenna, showing up with incorrect colors. Weird, huh? Also seems like a simple confusion of RGB vs. BGR…
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How Many Computers Are in Your Computer?
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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TinyWM – A tiny window manager in around 50 lines of C
TinyWM is a tiny window manager that I created as an exercise in minimalism. It is also maybe helpful in learning some of the very basics of creating a window manager. It is only around 50 lines of C. There is also a Python version using python-xlib.
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There isn't much point to HTTP/2 past the load balancer
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
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Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs
The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 and BSDCan 2025 - Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.
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How simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Learn the microarchitecture-level details of the processor that enable to execute two threads at the same time on a CPU core
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XCurl
It is often said that Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery. Also, remember libcrurl? That was the name of the thing Google once planned to do: reimplement the libcurl API on top of their Chrome networking library. Flattery or not, it never went anywhere. The other day I received an email asking me about ……
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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
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Apple has a bug in its disk I/O throttling code that affects raw disk copies
Matt Jacobson, recovering software engineer.
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I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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.NET 6 vs .NET 5 speedup
A year ago I wrote a post comparing .NET 5 performance with its predecessor on Fusion performance tests, and honestly, I was quite…
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Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you.
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Three Years on Google App Engine
For the last 3 years I worked on an application that runs on Google App Engine. It is a fascinating, unique piece of service Google is offering here. Unlike anything you’ll find elsewhere. This is my in-depth, personal take on it.
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When network is faster than browser cache (2020)
We assume that browser caches are near-instantaneous, but data shows that retrieving an object from cache can take hundreds of milliseconds!
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Measuring mutexes, spinlocks and how bad the Linux scheduler is
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successf…
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Writing a file system from scratch in Rust
A file system is responsible for organising and providing an abstraction over the storage devices where the data is physically stored. In this post, we will learn more about the concepts used by file systems, and how they fit together when writing your own.
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Concurrent Programming, with Examples
Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear.
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A distributed systems reading list
An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals
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Zig's New Async I/O
In celebration of the std.Io introduction patchset landing today , here is the text version of a short, interactive demo I gave at Zigtoberfest 2025 .
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Install Windows the Arch Linux Way
Installing Windows strictly through the Command Line is an important tool to have. If windows changes the installer or out of box experience, you can bypass any changes with this guide!
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Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
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50 years later, is two-phase locking the best we can do?
Two phase locking (2PL) was the first of the general-purpose Concurrency Controls to be invented which provided Serializability. In fact, 2P...
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