Sonotsugipaa

As far as I’m aware GamePass is already Xbox+Windows exclusive because it uses the Microsoft Store on PC

Windows 10 and 11 really dislike HDDs, that’s probably why you can’t admit to using HDDs online without getting stones thrown at you (I’ve been there before).

I’ve disabled paging files (= swap) for one of my Windows VMs, unfortunately - to my surprise - that only had a small performance boost, and I still need to let the VM chug for a few mintes before it even lets me open File Explorer.

… but it does improve performance, definitely consider doing it if you don’t need swap/paging/whatever they call it now.

I use Zsh too, though at this point is becoming detrimental to my (already limited) Bash skills because of features like the ${^array}{1,2,3} syntax which I use in some scripts of mine, which in turn I wouldn’t dare try to translate to Bash.

Unfortunately that’s already happening, I know a few people that are hard to convince to play something that isn’t on GamePass — I never insisted, but it’s still a bummer that I need M$'s blessing to play with people I know, considering I don’t have an Xbox and cross-play games that we all like are hard to find.

If the path to the dir is longer than $HOME, say, $HOME/Tools/modding/hd2-audio-modder/wwise/v123456789_idr_but_its_a_long_one/random file name with spaces, it makes more sense.

I’ll try using the braces syntax, if it does prevent word splitting I wasn’t aware of it, though it’s still slightly inconvenient (3 key inputs for each brace on my kb) and I’d probably still use quotes instead if I had to use Bash and had the file path in a variable for some reason.

… though at this point I’m probably overthinking it, atm I don’t recall better examples of my distaste for Bash expansion shenanigans.

Did some testing, here’s what I found.
Beware, it devolves into a rant against Bash and has little to do with the original topic - I just needed to scream into the void a little.

# Zsh
function argn { echo $#; }

var='spaced string'
argn $var
# Prints 1: makes sense, no word splitting here

var=(array 'of strings')
argn $var
# Prints 2: makes sense, I'm using a 2-wide array where I would
#           want 2 arguments (the second one happens to have
#           a whitespace in it)

# Bash
function argn { echo $#; }

var='spaced string'
argn $var
# Prints 2: non-array variable gets split in 2 with this simple reference;
#           I hate it, but hey, it is what it is

argn ${var}
# Prints 2: no, braces do not prevent word splitting as I think you suggested

var=(array 'of strings')
argn $var
# Prints 1: ... what?

echo $var
# Prints array: ... what?!?
#               It implicitly takes the first element?
#               At least it doesn't word-split said first element, right?

var=('array of' strings)
argn $var
# Prints 2:

Upon further investigation:

# Bash
mkdir /tmp/bashtest ; cd /tmp/bashtest
touch 'file 1'
touch 'file 2'

stat file*
# Prints the expected output of 'stat' called on both files;
# no quotes or anything, globbing just expands into
# 2 arguments without *word* splitting

files=('file 1' 'file 2')
stat $files
# stat: cannot statx 'file'
# stat: cannot statx '1'
# WHY? WHY DOES GLOBBING ACT SENSIBLY WHEN ARRAYS DO NOT?

I get that the Bash equivalent to Zsh’s $array is ${array[@]}, but making $array behave like it does in Bash has no advantage whatsoever.
… IS WHAT I WOULD SAY IF THAT WERE TRUE! YOU ALSO HAVE TO QUOTE "${array[@]}" BECAUSE WE LOVE QUOTES HERE AT BASH HQ!

# ... continued from before
stat "prefix ${files[@]}"
# stat: cannot statx 'prefix file 1'
# (regular 'stat' output for 'file 2')

While this behavior doesn’t make much sense to me, it also doesn’t make sense for me to write that “prefix” within the quotes in the first place, right?
YES. BECAUSE SPLITTING IS NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT WHEN YOU PUT STUFF IN QUOTES.

Sorry, I’ll stop.

o7, probably worth a shot

Expansion matters because using parameters without quotes automatically splits words, and IIRC a quoted array parameter can still be split into its members — as opposed to Zsh, where word splitting doesn’t happen unprompted and quoted array parameters are flattened into a single string.

Generally if I want to run $HOME/random executable with spaces.exe through Wine in a terminal I copy the path in Dolphin (CTRL+SHIFT+C, or CTRL+ALT+C idr) and paste it, within quotes if needed (the four extra key inputs are the annoying part).

I find that much faster than manually typing find "$HOME" -name "random executable with spaces.exe" -type x -exec wine "{}" \;, or opening an editor to insert backslashes.

They’re annoying to deal with when interactively using command-line shells, especially so when pasting unquoted and unescaped file paths, doubly especially so with Bash where parameter expansion makes no goddamn sense if you know at least one other programming language

It’s not about the amount of swap space, it’s a problem that happens when swapping happens for big chunks of data at a time.

Windows aggressively swaps out things way before it’s necessary, you can try increasing the system’s “swappiness”; I’m writing this from my phone, but when I get to my PC I’ll write out how to do it (unless somebody else does it before I do).

You can set it by writing vm.swappiness=60 in a file like /etc/sysctl.d/50-swappiness.conf.
The value 60 is arbitrary, if you increase it the system will try to swap out things more aggressively; the name of the file is also partially arbitrary, but AFAIK, it has to begin with two digits — the system will read all the files inside /etc/sysctl.d in order, and the settings in higher-numbered files will be applied over lower ones.

Officially, this is the explaination of the vm.swappiness parameter.
You can read and write the value with your shell:

#!/usr/bin/bash
sysctl vm.swappiness  # shows you the current value
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=69  # sets the swappiness to 69 AND shows you the new value

A Wider and less Local LAN, if you will