Google's "little" VMs, one of which I'm seemingly getting for free, at least for a year, can be run pretty much like any Debian Linux system. That's great if you're a Debian expert, not so great if you're not.

Luckily I know how to get around in Debian, and like pretty much everybody I can search (or "Google" if you will) for everything else.

One thing I can say is that the Google Cloud Platform virtual terminal, which opens in a web window, is very usable.

Much cloud pricing is complicated (barring those like Digital Ocean, which spell out what's going to cost you per month), but it appears that Google is giving us one "micro"-VM for free with no time limit as part of the "Google Platform Free Tier":

• 1 f1-micro instance per month (US regions us-central1, us-east1 and us-west1 only)
• 30 GB-months HDD
• 5 GB-months snapshot in select regions
• 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)

Somehow I either had to sign up for a credit. You can get a free shell without signing up, but to get the actual VM, you need to fork over a credit card number and "accept" the credit over one year. I'm not sure if/when/how I'll be charged, but I will definitely be keeping my eye on that.

My sites definitely consume more than 1 GB per month: In March 2019, http://stevenrosenberg.net used 4.69 GB, and http://updates.stevenrosenberg.net used 216 MB.

This is a compelling use case for Digital Ocean because that service offers VMs with 1 TB of bandwidth, which is 1000+ times what Google is offering for "free." The predictable, consistent yet low pricing is very attractive.

Still, there's something to be said for /home/public//cgi-bin/ode.cgi, and if I keep an eye on the bandwidth and charges, I'll see what kind of value proposition the Google Cloud Platform offers for smaller users.

When a device driver kills your computer's performance, but only when run in conjunction with a certain web browser, and that certain web browser is not Google Chrome, good luck with getting your problem fixed.

That's what's happening to my HP Envy 15 as133cl laptop. Running Google Chrome poses no problems.

But when I run Mozilla Firefox, the laptop's Conexant audio driver has a program called Flow that does something related to figuring out what kind of audio your PC might want to play. And when Firefox is running, Flow can't seem to figure out what is going on and runs all the time, taking a large percentage of available CPU along with it.

I solved this problem with an Internet search. It was easy and painless.

After I installed the new driver, the problem returned. I'm lazy enough that all I did was bring up the Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete, then select it) and kill Flow from there. I haven't rebooted since, Flow hasn't returned, and I'm having zero issues with audio on the computer.

Update: It's annoying that killing those two processes doesn't stop Flow from killing laptop performance. There is a third Conexant process that I should kill to see if it takes care of the Flow problem. Why it's STILL a problem, I don't know. If it affected Chrome, it would cause a major uproar and be fixed in a week or less.