On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 18:43 (+0000), dep via tde-users wrote:
said Jim via tde-users:
I always assumed the decision to pretend every display is 96 DPI was some incompetent manager who wanted to exert his or her authority.
You assumed incorrectly. When GUIs came out, 96dpi was right for most monitors, which had been produced for use with text-mode consoles. Remember, VGA is 640x480 @ 16 colors. That's why GEM, GeoWorks, Windows, and OS/2 defaulted to it. It became the standard, and we were all amazed when we could get video cards and monitors of higher resolution. And even more amazed that there were places in config.sys or auteoexec.bat where we could change the dots per inch from the 96 standard. And pleased that when we pushed it beyond its limits after a few seconds it would revert to something visible.
I was talking about when so-called "HiDPI" displays started becoming common, instead of doing The Right Thing and adapting software to recognize that different pixel densities existed, someone, somewhere decided to pretend that screens were still 96 DPI, and then to deal with that lie by inventing logical pixels and other such nonsense. This (I suppose) is a quick and dirty fix for people who specified their font sizes and other graphical features in pixels, instead of points (or some other measure independent of physical pixels). But that isn't the right solution.
Blowing a fuse shouldn't have affected your laptop. Perhaps he caused a huge voltage spike? Even then, it is curious that the SSD went kabloouie without your motherboard also being damaged.
A brand new Crucial 1tb SSD died here last year due to a very brief power glitch. Didn't blow up the computer but did utterly destroy the SSD. Which Crucial kindly replaced. And I put a USB between the wall plug and the computer. SSDs are more delicate than you might suppose. The glitch did no harm to the machine.
Maybe they are more delicate than I imagine. But I have 4 of them running on RPis and those machines have had power glitches and power failures many times (the local power company isn't as big on preventative maintenance as they could be), and so far (crosses finger) I have never had a problem with any of them. Nor with SATA SSDs or NVM storage inside another 4 or 5 laptops. But perhaps some brands or models are more subject to power glitches than others.
But you are decimating the performance of your laptop using only external drives over USB, at least if they are "thumb drives". I have a couple of Raspberry Pis which have all their files on external SSDs. The disk performance there is quite acceptable (400 - 500 MB/sec?).
It depends on numerous factors. Some, as you say, might be reduced in performance by one tenth.
TeX (and LaTeX and ConTeXt) are not wysiwyg systems...
LyX: https://www.lyx.org/
I didn't suggest that, because of one and only one observation. Specifically, I knew one person that used it, and it seemed to me (and maybe this was the person's fault in that they used it in an inefficient way) that Lyx' attempt to shield the person from actually having to know some LaTeX reduced the person's overall productivity considerably.
Jim