Amazon has a "refurbished" program, where you can find lots of cheap thin clients and smaller form factor desktop machines.
However, the refurbished computers often have their SSD/HDD replaced with a crappy one that is unreliable, so I would recommend assuming that you assume that you will need to buy storage in addition to that.
But, overall I really like Amazon Refurbished because you get a better quality guarantee (warranty/returns), but a cheaper price.
Winlator is really just termux + proot + box64 + wine wrapped in a neat UI (+ controller support). You can, and people have set this up manually before winlator came along. You'll either need termux-x11 or vnc for the GUI.
Mobox is a similar project that does this automatically via a script... but I don't see a license in their github repo, plus they require the proprietary input bridge for touch controls.
As a someone who has used both Arch, and Debian, neither has less or more bugs.
Debian has the same bugs, over the period of their stable release, and Arch has changing bugs (like a new set every update lol).
Yes, Arch is going to get a lot more features. But it comes at the cost of "instability". Which is not so much a lack of reliability but instead, how much the software changes. I remember a firefox bug that caused a crash when I attempt to drag bookmarks in my bookmarks bar around, which lasted for like a week — then it went away.
The idea behind projects like Debian, is that for an entity that needs stability, you can simply work around the bugs, since you always know what and where they are. (Well, the actual intent is that entities write patches and submit them to Debian to fix the bugs but no one does that).
Another thing: Debian Stable has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 22.04. This happens because Ubuntu "freezes" a Sid version, and those packages don't get major updates for a while. So often, the latest Debian stable has newer packages than the older Ubuntu releases.
Termux recently got moved off of the play store (kinda), and is now only available on f-droid/github, because Google was further locking down what they allowed on their store.
And in addition to that, they recently added a restriction in later versions of Android: "Child process limit". Although this limit used to not there, when enabled, it prevents users from truly running arbitrary linux programs, like via termux.
Although the child process limit can still be disabled in developer options, it doesn't bode well for how flexible base android in the future will be, since many times corpos like Google move stuff into the "secret" options before eventually removing that dial all together.
TLDR: Termux has been, and is a thing... for now.
Also, I want to shout out winlator. It uses a linux proot, similator to termux, and has box64 and wine inside that proot that people can use to play games. I tested with Gungeon, and it even has controller support and performance, which is really impressive.
Linus complains the author didn’t submit the patch to some places for public comments and testing BEFORE requesting a merge.
Although a reasonable expectation, I can't find anything about this on the kernel.org docs for posting patches. They seem to imply that you just check and verify your patch before submitting it on the kernel mailing list, but that's it. I didn't see any mentions of mailing lists explicitly for feedbacks or other conventions.
And before you start whining - again - about how you are fixing bugs, let me remind you about the build failures you had on big-endian machines because your patches had gotten ZERO testing outside your tree.
As far as I know, the Linux Foundation does not provide testing infrastructure to it's developers. Instead, corporations are expected to use their massive amount of resources to test patches across a variety of cases before contributing them.
Yes, I think Kent is in the wrong here. Yes, I think Kent should find a sponsor or something to help him with testing and making his development more stable (stable in the sense of fewer changes over time, rather than stable as in reliable).
But, I kinda dislike how the Linux Foundation has a sort of... corporate centric development. It results in frictions with individual developers, as shown here.
Over all of the people Linus has chewed out over the years, I always wonder how many of them were independent developers with few resources trying to figure things out on their own. I've always considered trying to learn to contribute, but the Linux kernel is massive. Combined with the programming pieces I would have to learn, as well as the infrastructure and ecosystem (mailing list, patch system, etc), it feels like it would be really infeasible to get into without some kind of mentor or dedicated teacher.
So I don't know how much you know about the shell, but the way that the linux command line works is that there are a set of variables, called environment variables, which dictate so me behavior of the shell. For example, $PATH variable, refers to what directories to search through, when you try to execute a program in your shell.
The documentation you linked, wants you to create a custom shell variable, called SCALE_PATH, consisting of a folder path, which contains the compiled binaries/programs of scale you want to run.
This command: export PATH="${SCALE_PATH}/bin:$PATH"
temporarily edits your PATH variable to add that folder with the scale programs you want to run to your path, enabling you to execute them from your shell.
Thorium's entire focus is on performance. As another commenter has noted, that means no security updates, and no privacy features.
I wouldn't recommend it for daily use, but if you are playing a browser based game it's worth testing out. I used to play krunker.io and I tested it to see if I could get more FPS (FPS equaled faster movement speed back then), but I didn't see any major performance improvements over the major krunker clients or Microsoft Edge (other most performant browser).
You may be interested in this:
https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator
There is also a fork with increased performance, at the cost of some usability enhancements: https://github.com/MrPhryaNikFrosty/Winlator-Frost
Linux mint debian edition is not based on testijg, but rather on stable*.
This misconception may be caused by the fact that the latest debian stable, has newer packages than many of the older-but-not-ancient ubuntu releases, which were originally based off of debian sid.
*I cannot find a first party source for this, only third party
Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 hits beta with reassuringly little drama. Think Debian 12 plus Mint's polish and a friendlier UX for non-techies
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/13/linux_mint_debian_edition_hands_on/
Sorry. I meant if you wanted to use only packages from one set of repositories/one distro, for if you were looking for lower level packages like the kernel or desktop environment to be updated.
Eventually? How about now?
https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator