review


Thoughts on Chrome OS

After a long time of ignoring this platform and only ever having tried CloudReady (which this is based on), I tried to install ChromeOS on some of my older machines. While the older ones like Thinkpad X200 performed poorly as expected, newer machines performed well. I’ll elaborate on a few different points in which I see the value of this OS. Installation There aren’t many options to choose from and when installing this OS, you are going to wipe your existing OS.

Forza Horizon 5 performance hit on VFIO system

I am trying to document how much of an impact VFIO has on gaming performance. More benchmarks will come in the future, but for now, let’s look at Forza Horizon 5. I picked Forza Horizon 5 to do these tests as it is somewhat demanding and has a benchmark mode which displays somewhat interesting results. The graphics are all maxed out and both vsync and g-sync are off, in game and in any applicable place.

The smart and easy ACME client

After trying out different ACME clients, like dehydrated or getssl, I always came back to certbot. But now, I have finally switched to acme.sh, which, as a simple shell script, is compatible with my KISS ideology. It is used by some big projects like FreeBSD and Proxmox, for their SSL needs. Lots of features Out of the box, you get support for over 70 DNS hooks (from cloud providers like Amazon to actual software like PowerDNS).

Alpine Linux as a desktop operating system

Alpine Linux is an interesting Linux distribution meant for embedded devices. Its key ability is running on a diskless system. Unlike other embedded distributions, it remains very usable for desktop use. The recommended, standard edition, runs a hardened Linux kernel with grsec and PaX patchsets. This strengthens the security of an already secure operating system. I will explain why I chose Alpine as my daily driver and share my opinion on its package management, memory footprint and shortcomings.