Atemu

I also have several virtual machines which take up about 100 GiB.

This would be the first thing I'd look into getting rid of.

Could these just be containers instead? What are they storing?

nix store (15 GiB)

How large is your (I assume home-manager) closure? If this is 2-3 generations worth, that sounds about right.

system libraries (/usr is 22.5 GiB).

That's extremely large. Like, 2x of what you'd expect a typical system to have.

You should have a look at what's using all that space using your system package manager.

EDIT: ncdu says I've stored 129.1 TiB lol

If you're on btrfs and have a non-trivial subvolume setup, you can't just let ncdu loose on the root subvolume. You need to take a more principled approach.

For assessing your actual working size, you need to ignore snapshots for instance as those are mostly the same extents as your "working set".

You need to keep in mind that snapshots do themselves take up space too though, depending on how much you've deleted or written since taking the snapshot.

btdu is a great tool to analyse space usage of a non-trivial btrfs setup in a probabilistic fashion. It's not available in many distros but you have Nix and we have it of course ;)

Snapshots are the #1 most likely cause for your space usage woes. Any space usage that you cannot explain using your working set is probably caused by them.

Also: Are you using transparent compression? IME it can reduce space usage of data that is similar to typical Nix store contents by about half.

You should worry about that in any case. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time now.

Google is only going to "respond" by doing things it's explicitly ordered to comply with and of course extremely reluctantly; only doing the bare minimum that could be seen as complying.

They sure as hell aren't going to open up the google surveillance services unless explicitly and specifically forced to do so by a court.

This is entirely untrue.

Any part that is already open source will eternally be open source.

Only in the state that it is right now. Google could at any point simply stop releasing the source code with no warning and make all further modifications proprietary.

there are rules about using open source code in projects that requires them to also be open source.

That is only true for copyleft licenses. Licenses that are merely "open source" (also called "permissive") such as the Apache License 2.0 which the AOSP is licensed under do not give two hoots about what you do with the code as long as you give appropriate credit.

The only part of Android that has a copyleft license is the Linux kernel (GPLv2) and I wouldn't really consider it part of the AOSP in practice.

You can do it but I wouldn't recommend it for your use-case.

Caching is nice but only if the data that you need is actually cached. In the real world, this is unfortunately not always the case:

1. Data that you haven't used it for a while may be evicted. If you need something infrequently, it'll be extremely slow.
2. The cache layer doesn't know what is actually important to be cached and cannot make smart decisions; all it sees is IO operations on blocks. Therefore, not all data that is important to cache is actually cached. Block-level caching solutions may only store some data in the cache where they (with their extremely limited view) think it's most beneficial. Bcache for instance skips the cache entirely if writing the data to the cache would be slower than the assumed speed of the backing storage and only caches IO operations below a certain size.

Having data that must be fast always stored on fast storage is the best.

Manually separating data that needs to be fast from data that doesn't is almost always better than relying on dumb caching that cannot know what data is the most beneficial to put or keep in the cache.

This brings us to the question: What are those 900GiB you store on your 1TiB drive?

That would be quite a lot if you only used the machine for regular desktop purposes, so clearly you're storing something else too.

You should look at that data and see what of it actually needs fast access speeds. If you store multimedia files (video, music, pictures etc.), those would be good candidates to instead store on a slower, more cost efficient storage medium.

You mentioned games which can be quite large these days. If you keep currently unplayed games around because you might play them again at some point in the future and don't want to sit through a large download when that point comes, you could also simply create a new games library on the secondary drive and move currently not played but "cached" games into that library. If you need it accessible it's right there immediately (albeit with slower loading times) and you can simply move the game back should you actively play it again.

You could even employ a hybrid approach where you carve out a small portion of your (then much emptier) fast storage to use for caching the slow storage. Just a few dozen GiB of SSD cache can make a huge difference in general HDD usability (e.g. browsing it) and 100-200G could accelerate a good bit of actual data too.

Basically what I wanted to ask is whether they're taking this seriously and are doing demanding stuff or whether they're just starting out with basic things. Also how important gaming vs. Unreal is to them; would they care if it took a bit longer to e.g. compile shaders if that meant 20% more fps?

Is that built-in, or do you have to configure it yourself

It's the official bang for Startpage. You can't configure custom bangs in DDG; Kagi can do that.

I agree, which is why I’ve been happy to continue using DDG.

I've found DDG/bing's results to be quite lacking.

If I can't find something I can just add a quick !g to my already existing query and look it up on Google instead, which I've found rather convenient.

Yeah I used to do the same (but with !s).

It's much more convenient to just have good search results to begin with though. Kagi uses the Google index and a few others and you have your own filtering and ranking on top.

In the beginning I felt tempted to do !s a few times too but the results were always worse, so I quickly unlearned doing that.

Executing bangs is also a lot quicker with Kagi; DDG is kind of a slog.

Chances are that it doesn't work there either. What actually does the OC is the kernel; the GUIs merely write the desired values into the correct files in /sys.

This has nothing to do with the ROM. While you can embed trusted keys into a ROM which is useful for debugging, what I mean is the regular trusted ADB keys that get added when you allow ADB access from your computer via the pop-up.

If you've allowed your PC ADB access recently (this expires after some time), your key should be trusted. If it isn't, there is the method to make it trusted I described.

You do need to modify the system partitioni to enable ADB at boot though. Just do what I described.

Ecosia being any better in this regard would be news to me. They also rely on ads for funding.

Oh they've been getting worse for sure but Bing is still worse. I've used the Bing index via DuckDuckGo for years and it's quite bad.

I now use Kagi which uses both Google and Bing indices (among others) and it's much better and I think most of that is because the Google index is used.