This, @Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works.
I’m an audio engineer and can confirm that if you want the best quality audio for the file size, you want Opus. Opus at 128kbps is considered transparent, so it’s roughly as good as 320kbps MP3s, but y’know, less than half the size.
Partitions on SSDs are generally bad for long term performance and sustainability, so yeah, not great. If I were you I’d delete the Windows partition and extend one of the others. Also you could have the individual Linux distro partitions be smaller if you used a single home partition across them. That would probably minimize any negative side effects of partitioning the hell out of an SSD.
The unified RAM is not one of the parts unique to Apple. They just market it as if it is.
Shit, you’re right. It has 2 gotchas at least just in that one question
You need to make it under one million
You cross out all of the 0s after the 1 and first 5 0s, so that the number is 100,000
Or you cross out just the 1
Based on the “U” at the end of the CPU model name, I’m guessing this is a laptop. OP, your CPU probably needs a re-paste because it’s got a decade old CPU and the laptop fan is inadequate. That’s why it’s shutting down.
Invincible, you say?
Xanmod has a bunch of little tweaks, mostly I’d say it helps with frame pacing more than anything else. It’s only maybe 1-2fps difference most of the time, but it’s very close to the upstream mainline kernel in terms of release timing, whereas Mint keeps to LTS kernels.
Likewise, the kisak-mesa PPA just keeps you more up to date with the upstream package version.
IMO the biggest differences are responsiveness, frame pacing, and getting to have access to the latest fixes/features ASAP while still getting to use the very stable package versions for the rest of the system.
For my gaming rig I use Mint Cinnamon with the Xanmod kernel and kisak-mesa PPA for bleeding edge performance but otherwise a very low-maintenance, convenient system.
For my personal laptop (ThinkPad T480s) I use Arch with KDE. For my various mini PCs used as servers, I use primarily Debian derivatives, except for my Mac Mini which runs Asahi Arch so I could optimize the use of its 8G of RAM.
Generally this is true, but it depends on the encoder used. Back during the huge boom of MP3 popularity in the late 90s and early 00s, it likely did make a difference, so if you’re looking at MP3s that were encoded back then I would go for 320kbps every time just to be safe, but modern encoders generally do much better like you said.
These days if I were encoding an MP3 I’d use LAME at -V0 setting, letting it lower the bitrate where it can without sacrificing quality. That said, per this test from 2014 that I found as a source on Wikipedia, a 96kbps VBR Opus file is at least as good if not better than an MP3 with -V 5 as the setting on LAME with approximately a 135kbps bitrate.