There's a old school tool call sar which can help you figure out what is causing the performance issues. Found a recent guide: Mastering sar in Linux: A Comprehensive Guide

If your system uses systemd you can set resource limits like cpu per process or user.

the only book i own on text editing

There is no such thing as maintenance free hosting. There is just saving it all up for the eventual outage.

yes but usually at the family and friends distribution level

Send them a nice card with a personal note of thanks

First off, only a subset of cursive systems connect all letters. These are called Continuous Cursive. Second, many cursive writing systems do include numbers.

Everything you type in the chat box is sent to the LLM provider but they get Duck Duck Go's IP instead of yours.

So if you type personal things its mostly just like typing them directly to ChatGPT. However, with duck.ai your IP, Browser info, Location (if shared), etc is seen by Duck Duck Go instead of OpenAI.

I don't think DuckDuckGo is lying when they say that they don't use your chats to train models. However, that leaves plenty for OpenAI and Duck Duck Go to do with your chats, like building shadow profiles.

I suggest that if you want to be anonymous to Duck Duck Go, then use duck.ai via vpn or tor. Always assume the content of your chat session is being logged by the LLM provider.

My work gave me a choice of a chromebook or a windows laptop when I started since the company uses the Google stack for everything.

I asked if I could get a high end chromebook and it was approved. Its easy to install linux apps in the dev container and they run seamlessly with the the chrome apps on the desktop and the window manager has multiple desktops (which is how I like to do things). Since I have to use Gmail and Google Docs for work anyway, the chromebook is really not bad and much better than having to use Windows.

I don't think you can owe somebody for something you didn't ask for

They help me a lot but they aren't a magic cure.

A young broke me once spent 3 weeks after school each day in 1994 downloading slackware floppy images from my Dad's AOL account via modem so I could try it on my 386.