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Interesting post, it made me wonder. At one time FreeBSD swap usage/logic was far better than what Linux did. Is that still the case ?
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I've noticed that the various tools report different amounts of free memory. I appreciate finally having an explanation for why.
the end struck me - a picture of an os book. I wonder if students these days retain their books after college, or do they get returned as a rental?
I graduated a decade ago but there was a pretty decent post-semester market for people selling their textbooks to other students (mostly via posting in various Facebook groups). Given the cost of college nowadays, if that ends up saving students a bit of money, it's probably worth it over saving the textbooks themselves.

Most years my parents ended up just driving my stuff to my aunt's house where she kept it in her garage over the summer after I packed it all up since I grew up several states away but my aunt loved in the area, and by the end of senior year, the textbooks I never managed to sell had added up to almost an entire extra bin (which was heavier than any of the others because they mostly just had clothes). For people who didn't have parents who loved driving everywhere in a large enough car or relatives in the area, this seems like it would be even more annoying (potentially ending up with just donating the leftover textbooks or maybe leaving them on the street like furniture and stuff often is at the end of the year on campuses). If people want to keep their textbooks, more power to them, but I'm not convinced that having a cheaper way that also simplifies the logistics of moving isn't better.

In college ATM and while I usually keep old textbooks, I have sold a couple on ebay to free up shelf space.
Thank you for such a quality post.
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Great job on getting the fixes merged!
I don’t understand the part about using heuristics and deciding what counts as used memory…

Used memory for the system is always total minus available.

Heuristics? I would hope that the system knows precisely what is using every single byte of physical and virtual memory. Is this a reporting problem? Why do we have to settle for heuristics and not the exact number?

I wonder if these btop fixes got into the standard ports collection? Or even upstream?

I like the command for viewing the ARC cache size, never knew that. It's only 2GB on my system (of 64GB RAM).

As for the “unauthorized” sign:

Book publishers used to print India/SEA-only editions of books only sold in those countries, significantly cheaper than in the US or Europe. Then a Thai guy realized that this would be a good business opportunity: buy cheaper books and then import them to the US. Wiley brought him to court, went to the SCOTUS, Wiley lost the case. So they ended up printing cheaper edition books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....

Mind you "price discrimination" like this still exist in the digital world where locality is easier to be enforced. For example Steam has extensive regional pricing across countries so the same game can be significantly cheaper in Russia, India, Brazil etc. compared to US or EU

An example: https://steamdb.info/app/413150/

https://partner.steamgames.com/pricing/explorer

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/pricing/currencies