tychosmoose

Definitely weird. WiFi connections are poor, but VPN connection over the same WiFi link is good.

That makes me think perhaps DNS like others have said, or it could be something with your local routing table trying to reach something that’s not reachable. I would probably check the routing table first for anything weird. Like, you might have a static route applied from DHCP, but it’s ignored by your phone OS.

Since you can reproduce it in the browser I would probably look next at browser dev tools (F12). Go to the network tab. Then reproduce the problem. Once the task properly finishes, hit pause and sort by duration. You can also right click the headers and add a Timings>Latency column. See if there’s anything interesting.

Like, are the slow steps hitting a new domain name? Is there a slow POST among faster GETs? Is a step repeating after a timeout?

If nothing’s obvious there I would be tempted to repeat but lower level with wireshark to get the whole network picture. Get a good capture of the problem with a general sense of the timing of the problem pauses (in seconds from the start of capture). Find them in the cap and see what’s what. Compare good vs bad if no clear trends present themselves.

In #1, are you connecting to the VPN from the PC or from the router?

openSUSE Tumbleweed is the rolling release, where you may have dependency decisions to make during regular updates. Updates must be done in the terminal.

The more beginner friendly version is openSUSE Leap. That has a longer release cycle, and you use the Discover interface (or yeast, or zypper in the terminal) to update.

Either is pretty friendly. Both have recent KDE.

That makes sense, yeah. It’s probably the closest comparison.

Here’s a fun comparison: Tennessee vs Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania

They have very similar population density (70/km² vs 65/km²). Tennessee is roughly 4x the area and population.

There are only 2 inter-city train stops in Tennessee, in Memphis and a small town to it’s north, both on the 1x/day service between Chicago and New Orleans. The largest city (and its state capitol) Nashville has no rail service.

The entire state of Tennessee has only 10 inter-city bus stops. Ten! Serving 7M people. The 4th largest city in the state is Chattanooga (181k), and it has no inter-city bus and no rail.

The worst part, from a transportation perspective, is that our low density rural areas in the US are often isolated homesteads. Fully scattered single family farms and ranches, miles from the next family. We don’t have as much village centric rural areas as in Europe. So it makes delivering services (transportation, education, health care) to our rural population much harder.

Public transportation in cities varies. But inter-city transportation? In most of the USA you simply cannot travel between towns or cities on public transportation. There are a few inter-city bus options (Greyhound, Flix, Megabus), but those don’t go everywhere.

The rail options outside of the NE corridor (Boston to Washington DC, basically) are very sparse. Here’s the map: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-020923.pdf

That’s it. Most of those routes are at most once per day in each direction. So if you city even has a stop (which it probably doesn’t) the train may only come through in the middle of the night. Some routes are only 3x/week. And because of the massive distances involved and old equipment, it takes at least 70h+ to travel from coast to coast (more really, since connection times are long) and costs twice the price of a 6h flight ($250+ vs $80-120).

Trains are often on schedule, but can be many hours late. Once they are off schedule they are at the mercy of the freight train lines (who own the tracks) for passing. You can get stuck behind a slow moving cargo train for many hours.

Why is it like this? It’s complicated. But it starts with very low population density, large areas/distances, and a very different relationship between the individual and the state in the US vs most of Europe. Add the rise of suburbs in the automobile right when many US cities were growing. Another factor is public attitudes. People think that public transportation is for poor people. I know people who have never ridden a city bus, and I live in a city that probably has above average public transportation for the region.

Anyway, as a public transportation rider-by-choice I feel your pain. Having spent a few weeks in Germany recently (with a DT for travel), and having ridden extensively on US train and bus networks, yous is definitely much, much better. Resist the politics of privatization and decay.

The dislodge line is where we had to pause for laughing. Delivered with such testiness.

Hilarious!

The Long Kiss Goodnight

https://imdb.com/title/tt0116908

Geena Davis and Samuel L Jackson. He said in 2019 that it was his favorite role. It was released after a flop for Davis and director Renny Harlin (then her husband), and may have had poor press related to that.

It has an unlikely hero, plenty of action sequences, some fun performances (I had to pause it after a funny line from Brian Cox cracked me up), and heart. Solidly entertaining. But low expectations might help.