Like start Firefox? I have no idea why it takes multiple seconds to bring up a blank window when starting a comparably useful program like Claws Mail is absolutely instantaneous.
To be honest, yes, generally programs that don't start instantaneously do something very unnecessary and stupid that has nothing to do with actual CPU performance. As in they read thousands of tiny files or they decompress files or they wait for some sort of answer from the network, or they make 10k+ expensive API calls or all of the above. Firefox is so big it might fall into the "all of the above" category, but to answer that question definitively you'd have to analyze what Firefox actually does.
And of course, making the decompression 15-20% faster by optimizing the decompression code (which is usually not even written by the developers of said software but just some external library) won't even make a difference because 20% less than 5 seconds is still 4 seconds which is way too long for a program to start. Instead using a different compression algorithm that increases file size by 25% but decompression speed by 10x would actually start solving the problem, with the next step being to ask why the program needs to read so much damn data at the start in the first place.
But since NVMe SSDs and Intel CPUs with very high boost clocks are quickly becoming the norm now even for laptops I don't see much of that happening, because Firefox starts pretty quickly (~1 second) on those machines.
Fwiw, Firefox stores almost everything it will need on startup in one large file (omni.ja) precisely to avoid the "thousands of tiny files" problem. That data is uncompressed, precisely to avoid the decompression problem. The low-hanging fruit has largely been picked.
As for why so much data needs to be read... I just checked, and on Mac the main Firefox library (the executable itself is mostly a stub) is 120MB. So that's going to take a second or three just to read in at typical HDD speeds (faster on a good SSD), and then the dynamic linker has to do its thing on that big library, which is not instantaneous either.
How big is the Claws Mail binary? A large part of the cost of starting up Firefox, or other large programs, is just getting the binary from disk into memory plus all the work the dynamic linker needs to do once it's there.
Well, the English "V" is nearly identical to German "W"; the German "V" is nearly identical to English and German "F" and the English "W" doesn't quite exist in German. Someone had to point out to me as well that I was mispronouncing "water" as "vater" instead of "uuater" about ten years after I was somewhat fluent in the language. I never heard the difference before and native English speakers typically don't go around correcting the pronunciation of strangers….
Abendbrot is probably not regional, though Abendessen (evening meal) may be more standard use, especially when going out or having a small family meal is not implied.
Brotzeit is regional for a mid-day meal (10am-5pm?), with Imbiss and Vesper other alternatives. Those three can also be "taken with you" ("eine Brotzeit/einen Imbiss/eine Vesper mitnehmen") when leaving your house to be consumed during (e.g.) a day trip.
I thought you could buy tickets from Germany to e.g. Barcelona with Deutsche Bahn? The "only" problems are that one needs to visit a physical office of theirs as online booking is not possible and you may pay a lot more than buying individual cheap tickets with the operators.
> Just compare Greta Thunberg (which is a person with zero suggestions)
This is a lie. Plenty of suggestions have been made from this part of the political spectrum which are primarily based on incentivizing less damaging behaviour. The problem is that while we can reduce flying and we can reduce trips by car and we can reduce meat consumption and we can force shipping companies to use more environmentally friendly albeit more expensive fuels, none of the "technological solutions" you and other people say "should be developed" exist at the moment. By all means, feel free to invent new technologies which reduce carbon footprints and which help tackle climate change, but stop saying that really someone should develop these things so that maybe they could be used twenty years from now.
Twenty years ago, we had the option of either drastically raising taxes on CO2 or trusting that "technology" would arrive to reduce CO2 footprints. We were promised exclusively electric cars everywhere by 2020, passively cooled and heated housing etc. etc. None of those things have materialised, instead now we have people saying that we should "improve technology" and maybe in twenty years time we will have some solutions.
We also can produce energy without fossile fuels and burning coal. I am not saying we should not stop putting out carbon into the atmosphere. I am saying that the idea that we shouldn't travel as much etc will never fly (pun intended).
That is why you never see politicians and "influencers" etc live as they preach. Because people need to use a car, people need to fly and take boats.
What we can do is produce energy in a better way and consume it in a better way. If that means banning cars and planes that burn fuel, so be it. I am not against that. What I am against is the idea that we should stop doing stuff because our environment requires it.
I am working remotely, so I use my car more seldom that I belive many people that commutes every day. Yet, swedish companies that claim to be so environmental friendly seems to be very hostile to remote work in general.
Stuff like that is what I am against. Don't tell people how to live and then do the reverse yourself. I agree we should act now but the environmental movement is really more anti-progress than pro environment at least in Sweden in my opinion.
I have moved to Firefly III last year from the "My Expenses" app. Very happy so far, even though I don't use (and hide via uBlock) all the Budget-related items.
Updating is a bit annoying as there are no Debian packages and one has to essentially re-install from scratch on each update, but everything else is working perfectly well. Categorising expenses allows for easy monthly reports on shared expenses, too.
A fair number of universities and research institutes already use Nextcloud, e.g. the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility offers a Nextcloud installation for all users and TU Berlin also offers one for all of its students. There's no reason for these things to live in a "public cloud", whatever that means, self-hosting them is much more efficient, privacy friendly and secure (if only by compartmentalising).
