Jajcus

My experience with C++ was when C++ was a relatively new thing. Practically the only notable feature provided by the standard library, was that unholy abuse of bit shift operators for I/O. No standard collections or any other data types.

And every compiler would consider something else a valid C++ code or interpret the same code differently.

I am little bit prejudiced since then… and that is probably where the author is coming from too.

Then things were just getting more complicated (templates and other new syntax quirks), to fill the holes in attempts to make C a ‘high level language’.

Poland and probably most of Europe. You don’t need a car here for everyday living, so there is no point in giving licenses and care to kids.

Well behaving programs give control back to the kernel as soon as they are done with what they are doing. If they don’t the control is forcefully taken away after some assigned time.

It looks something like this:

Something happens – e.g. a key is pressed – a process waiting for this event is woken up and gets e.g. 100ms to do it stuff. If it can handle the key press in 50ms, kernel notes it used 50 ms of CPU time and can give control to another process waiting for an event or busy with other work. If the key press triggered long computation the process won’t be done in 100ms, the kernel notes it used 100ms of CPU time and gives control to other processes with pending events or busy with other work.
After one second the kernel may have noted:

Process A: used 50ms, then nothing, then 100ms, another 100ms and another 100ms
Process B: was constantly busy doing something, so it got allocated 6 * 100ms in that one second
Process C: just got one event and handled it in 50ms
Process D: was not waken at all

So total of 1000ms was used – the CPU was 100% busy
Of that 60% was process B, 35% process A and 5% process C.

And then that information is read from the kernel by top and displayed.

How does the OS even yank the CPU away from the currently running process?

Interrupts. CPU has means triggering and interrupt at a specific time. Interrupt means that CPU stops what it is doing and runs selected piece of kernel code. This piece of kernel code can save the current state of user process execution and do something else or restore saved execution of another process.

Not that easily and cheaply as they used to be.

Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.

I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.

I know Restic before Kopia and made a set of systemd units to run Restic backups on my home server and office workstation (both online 24/7).

Kopia seems much nicer for a regular user, so I use it on my and family laptops. I used to use Duplicati there, but that project seems dead.

Restic or Kopia, both to Backblaze.