If you only route your encrypted Usenet traffic through it then sure, the privacy argument is moot, you’re just spending money for worse performance without any benefit.
But way too many people route all their traffic through a VPN under the assumption that it improves privacy somehow, which often isn’t the case.
Worse performance, not everything works, and depending on the country you live in and which VPN provider you pick a VPN can actually be a downgrade in privacy since a second commercial entity now has the ability to look at all your traffic and distil valuable data from it to sell. The better VPN providers say they don’t do this (and some probably don’t) but a lot of them will definitely do so.
You’re probably correct, although I have no experience with zram so can’t be sure. But you’re absolutely right that PostgreSQL depends heavily on the OS disk cache for optimal performance. Lowering the PostgreSQL setting like Blaster M suggests won’t improve performance much, since all that setting does is tell PostgreSQL’s algorithms how much memory is likely to be allocated to the OS disk cache. Of course it’s best if it’s accurate, so you’re best off seeing how much memory is actually allocated to disk cache under heavy use before setting it, but it shouldn’t massively reduce performance if you don’t get it right.
Also: VPN is only really needed for torrenting, and that’s not the only way to pirate stuff. Usenet is perfectly fine to use without a VPN, since it’s encrypted (TLS/SSL if you configure it right) and other parties can’t just join your P2P network to see what you’re doing.
Check out carapace. It takes a bit of setup but basically tries to make all the completions work in almost any shell. For me that solved the big step backwards from fish’s completions that nu’s native completions have.
Yeah, it has. I think they started out as loving the concepts of PowerShell but hating the implementation, combined with the fact that PowerShell is clearly a Windows-first shell and doesn’t work so well on other OSes (it surprised me a lot to find out that PowerShell even has support for linux).
nu tries to implement these concepts in a way that’s more universal and can work equally well on Linux, macOS or Windows.
It’s arguably better as a scripting language than as an interactive shell. There are a lot of shell scripts out there that also dabble in light data processing, and it’s not the easiest thing to achieve well or without corner cases. So nu scripts are great if all you need is shell scripts with some data processing.
nu as an interactive shell is great for the use cases it shines at (like OP’s example), but a bit too non-POSIXy for a lot of people, especially since it’s not (yet) as well polished as something like fish is for example.
Edit to add that nu’s main drawback for scripting currently is that the language isn’t entirely stable yet, so you better be prepared to change your scripts as required to keep up with newer nu versions (they’re at 0.107 for a reason).
nu 's commands also work on JSON, so you don’t really need jq (or xq or yq) any more. It offers a unified set of commands that’ll work on almost any kind of structured data.
This particular example isn’t very good, just install multiple kernels (or compile one yourself) on your distro of choice and boot into the one you want with your bootloader of choice. Once set up you don’t even have to change any configs any more, just use an interactive menu on boot. So even easier than NixOS? There are plenty of valid use-cases for Nix, this isn’t one of them.