10 ms·

Dell/Alienware release Ubuntu gaming desktop

195 points by onosendai 14y ago

TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
Not my usecase at all, but really awesome for this to exist IMO.
- mkeung 14y ago
  like help get better video drivers to linux faster
  - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
    I just hope they don't partner too closely with canonical.
    - ihsw 14y ago
      Your concern is touching but unnecessary, Canonical has a rich history of interoperability and openness with the community.
      - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
        like with mir, and amazon search... I get it, thanks.
        pestaa 14y ago
        Okay, I very much dislike them too, but being afraid of a partnership with a hardware monopoly based on two mistakes is a bit of a stretch.
        Shorel 14y ago
        Five years of Mir development and they are still working on maximize and minimize support. I think Canonical has a point there.
  - primitur 14y ago
    Whats wrong with the existing drivers?
darxius 14y ago
Nice to see a big name company is doing this. It will surely help Linux adoption by a wider array of users. On another note, anyone else get that floating ad? Horribly placed and very annoying.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Surely it would make sense to at least offer a dual boot option? I can't really think of a solid reason for buying this, Steam on Linux is great and all but when your marketing is saying "With over 25 gaming titles available"..
- MacsHeadroom 14y ago
  Wine can run most popular games surprisingly well these days. Many even run better than they do under Windows.
  - bytefactory 14y ago
    That's interesting, I didn't know that! That makes the option of using an HTPC as a 'true' gaming platform (in addition to being a media center) a lot more likely. Do most of the recent games (Need for Speed, Counter Strike : Source, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed 3) run well, or is it mostly older games?
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      CS:S has a native Linux version that runs very well! Assassins creed 3 has "garbage" rating on WineHQ (http://appdb.winehq.org/ http://appdb.winehq.org/) and Far Cry 3 has "silver". So the answer for those is probably no. Not sure about NFS, guess it depends which one.
    - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
      FYI, CSS isn't recent :P CSS even runs natively on through Steam for Linux :) You can check how specific titles run under wine here: http://appdb.winehq.org/ http://appdb.winehq.org/
    - bytefactory 14y ago
      @jiggy2011 Thanks, that's very helpful! I meant NFS: Most Wanted, which came out in 2012. CS:S on Linux is definitely awesome news, and makes me more confident of Linux gaming becoming viable in the near-term. I think the Steambox/Steam Linux, Ouya and other such systems are definitely helping improve adoption. To be honest, I wouldn't spend much time trying to get something running under Wine unless it had a very high probability of success, and a moderate number of (easy) steps. After all, I already have the game running under Windows, and gaming's meant to be a casual activity I undertake after work :) It's awesome that the option is available for Linux enthusiasts, however! Edit: Ah, damn it, I meant CS:GO, not CS:S! I see that it's running fine under Wine, however!
ndrake 14y ago
I wonder how loud it'll be.
- jjkmk 14y ago
  I own an alienware in that config and it's dead quiet.
codebeard 14y ago
Too bad the hardware is overpriced... Reflects bad on Ubuntu.
- TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
  It's actually pretty expensive to build that powerful of a system in that format.
  - icegreentea 14y ago
    This is the crucial point. For the performance specs, the X51 is somewhat overpriced, even if you take into the account usual cut of a distributor. However, given it's form factor (it's basically the size of a game console), it's actually amazingly priced.
    - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
      My thoughts exactly. I don't think it's even possible to beat this by yourself, and I'm certainly the demographic that would try.
      - tracker1 14y ago
        I spent about the price of the low end to upgrade my desktop to a AMD's current top 8-core... that doesn't include re-using my video card, case and hard drives. It's not a bad option at all. May actually get a couple of the lower end ones, as both my grandmothers are due for an update, and one of them needs to get away from windows (too much crapware gets installed).
    - doktrin 14y ago
      Agreed. I would normally not consider purchasing a pre-made desktop, but this form factor does make it quite tempting. I would not feel ripped off, whereas historically I always felt Alienware machines were a little overpriced.
- mehrzad 14y ago
Glyptodon 14y ago
I have a hard time believing these will have much of a market. Maybe Dell's just trying to get the jump on Valve's own Steambox?
neya 14y ago
This is interesting, but not compelling. I want: 1) Better video drivers. 2) An option to Dual-boot with another OS. 3) To remove the painful Unity interface. 4) More titles to play. And then I would buy this without a second thought. With just Ubuntu, with very little games with mediocre Graphic card drivers and a painful interface like unity (try hiding/unhiding/switching between hidden windows for example) it's hard to convince myself to buy this..
- Gabler 14y ago
  I can see the value to your other points, but which desktop environment would you suggest over Unity? I always thought it was a pretty good fit for these type of things but my experience with other Linux desktop environments is pretty limited.
- dbbolton 14y ago
  1. I actually get comparable performance with the proprietary Nvidia driver in Windows and Linux. All of these systems seem to have Nvidia chipsets. If you can't even choose your driver (at the least with jockey), I wouldn't consider buying this. 2. What would stop you from installing your own OS pair? I'd think you could do it at the very least through a network boot, and probably USB. 3. As with 3, what would stop you? Even if you're stuck with Ubuntu, changing Xsessions shouldn't be a problem. The only way this should happen to be a problem is if there is no access to a shell with root privileges. And if it that's the case, almost no serious Linux user would consider buying such an un-free system. 4. With Steam an Humble now supporting Linux, there are quite a few more choices than there were just a couple of years ago, and I'm sure we'll see more in the years to come.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Unity is probably the most intuitive system for somebody switching from Win7. What else would you install by default? Gnome2/MATE/Xfce are showing their age. Gnome3 is even stranger. The only other plausible choice would be KDE. Unity is actually pretty good as an entertainment oriented interface. The ability to search games, apps, music and movies all from the main menu is very nice.
Apocryphon 14y ago
Window 8 has really gotten the OEMs running scared.
dbecker 14y ago
I don't know anything about gaming. But I assume that means it has a great GPU as well as a solid CPU... in which case this might be a good option for those of us doing scientific computing.
- TheEskimo 14y ago
  Well, the "Featured Systems" tab conveniently lists the GPU. It happens to be a GeForce GTX 645 on the cheap end and a GTX 660 on the high end. A 660 costs roughly $200. In addition, if your 'scientific computing' includes hashing or any of a number of other things, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an AMD card. Overall, it's slightly overpriced. In addition, OEM hardware is invariably uncustomizable (no extra PCI-E slots, lowest end power supply possible). If you wanted to do scientific computing then there would be much more efficient options. This is no better an option (and probably worse) than other run of the mill OEM hardware. I especially like how your comment began with "I don't know anything about <related topic>. But...".
- timbre 14y ago
  The Geforce 600-level cards are all terrible for scientific computing, which surprised no one as Nvidia has been slowly removing CUDA features from the Geforce cards since the 200s, trying to get everyone to upgrade to Teslas.
reactor 14y ago
I think it looks promising if you have an external monitor and considering to buy the box alone for your dev/day-to-day purpose, more like an alternative to desktop. You get 1 TB additional for 50 bucks as well.
notatoad 14y ago
This seems like the sort of thing where they don't really care whether they sell any or not. Gaming on Ubuntu is a hot blog topic right now, so they took an existing product and put Ubuntu on it. Probably cost a couple thousand to do all the paperwork surrounding a new SKU, and they'll probably sell enough of these to make cover that. Boom, Free marketing and some cred with the indie gaming & Linux community. And if Steam on Linux does take off, they've already got their foot in the door. It's kind of awesome that we're at a place where releasing a Ubuntu desktop is a matter of "why not?" Rather than "why?"
- kayoone 14y ago
  Agreed, this probably was a minimal cost compared to the positive publicity among the tech crowd. I hope Dell is going to be more innovative in the future and tries a few things as they are no public company anymore, i guess this can only help in the long term.
  - macco 14y ago
    In my oppinion Ubuntu give Dell the opportunity to differentiate from the market. A good idea would be exklusive Ubuntu machines.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Sort of.. We begged Dell for Linux/Ubuntu for years, and they finally give it to us.... Right after Ubuntu drove away a huge portion of their users with the Unity/Precise fiasco. Big corporations, always a lap behind.
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    >drove away a huge portion of their users We have any actual data or even reasonable estimates about just what proportion they drove away?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
AmVess 14y ago
High price/low spec. No thanks. The $300 Windows RT 32GB tab offer cracks me up, though.
jcr 14y ago
http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx > Equipped with the new NVIDIA® GTX 645 graphics card Don't bother. They want you to use proprietary driver blobs without any source code for them.
- xentronium 14y ago
  What stops you from using nouveau drivers?
  - primitur 14y ago
    The answer: nothing. His is a straw man argument. I thought this was a gaming machine, not a device-driver-development machine (why else would you need the source code?)
  - jcr 14y ago
    To do hardware accelerated 3D with nouveau, you need the to use the experimental nouveau mesa driver. It kind of works for some situations, but it still unstable and incomplete. You can find details here: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/MesaDrivers http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/MesaDrivers At present, nouveau is only working in a handful of linux distributions (with or without experimental hardware accelerated 3D support). All of the other UNIX-like systems are presently unable to run nouveau (e.g. all of the BSD's) The most important issue is actually the wasted developer time. Countless hours of developer time have been wasted in the attempt to reverse engineer the proprietary binary nVidia drivers for the sake of recreating their functionality in the open source nouveau driver. If nVidia wants the business and support of open source developers and users, then they should provide all of the required specs and documentation for their hardware needed to write open source drivers.
    - xentronium 14y ago
      In the meantime, is there any ideologically better proposition suitable for gaming?
pootch 14y ago
Steam is the worst gaming platform I have ever witnessed.
liljimmytables 14y ago
It's a nifty form factor and a reasonable graphics card, I would consider getting one as a portable VR station for use with the Oculus Rift (whenever, uh, you know, Oculus release the linux SDK).

195 points by onosendai 14y ago

TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago

Not my usecase at all, but really awesome for this to exist IMO.

mkeung 14y ago
like help get better video drivers to linux faster
- TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
  I just hope they don't partner too closely with canonical.
  - ihsw 14y ago
    Your concern is touching but unnecessary, Canonical has a rich history of interoperability and openness with the community.
    - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
      like with mir, and amazon search... I get it, thanks.
      - pestaa 14y ago
        Okay, I very much dislike them too, but being afraid of a partnership with a hardware monopoly based on two mistakes is a bit of a stretch.
      - Shorel 14y ago
        Five years of Mir development and they are still working on maximize and minimize support. I think Canonical has a point there.
- primitur 14y ago
  Whats wrong with the existing drivers?

darxius 14y ago

Nice to see a big name company is doing this. It will surely help Linux adoption by a wider array of users. On another note, anyone else get that floating ad? Horribly placed and very annoying.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Surely it would make sense to at least offer a dual boot option? I can't really think of a solid reason for buying this, Steam on Linux is great and all but when your marketing is saying "With over 25 gaming titles available"..

MacsHeadroom 14y ago
Wine can run most popular games surprisingly well these days. Many even run better than they do under Windows.
- bytefactory 14y ago
  That's interesting, I didn't know that! That makes the option of using an HTPC as a 'true' gaming platform (in addition to being a media center) a lot more likely. Do most of the recent games (Need for Speed, Counter Strike : Source, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed 3) run well, or is it mostly older games?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    CS:S has a native Linux version that runs very well! Assassins creed 3 has "garbage" rating on WineHQ (http://appdb.winehq.org/ http://appdb.winehq.org/) and Far Cry 3 has "silver". So the answer for those is probably no. Not sure about NFS, guess it depends which one.
  - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
    FYI, CSS isn't recent :P CSS even runs natively on through Steam for Linux :) You can check how specific titles run under wine here: http://appdb.winehq.org/ http://appdb.winehq.org/
  - bytefactory 14y ago
    @jiggy2011 Thanks, that's very helpful! I meant NFS: Most Wanted, which came out in 2012. CS:S on Linux is definitely awesome news, and makes me more confident of Linux gaming becoming viable in the near-term. I think the Steambox/Steam Linux, Ouya and other such systems are definitely helping improve adoption. To be honest, I wouldn't spend much time trying to get something running under Wine unless it had a very high probability of success, and a moderate number of (easy) steps. After all, I already have the game running under Windows, and gaming's meant to be a casual activity I undertake after work :) It's awesome that the option is available for Linux enthusiasts, however! Edit: Ah, damn it, I meant CS:GO, not CS:S! I see that it's running fine under Wine, however!

ndrake 14y ago

I wonder how loud it'll be.

jjkmk 14y ago
I own an alienware in that config and it's dead quiet.

codebeard 14y ago

Too bad the hardware is overpriced... Reflects bad on Ubuntu.

TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
It's actually pretty expensive to build that powerful of a system in that format.
- icegreentea 14y ago
  This is the crucial point. For the performance specs, the X51 is somewhat overpriced, even if you take into the account usual cut of a distributor. However, given it's form factor (it's basically the size of a game console), it's actually amazingly priced.
  - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
    My thoughts exactly. I don't think it's even possible to beat this by yourself, and I'm certainly the demographic that would try.
    - tracker1 14y ago
      I spent about the price of the low end to upgrade my desktop to a AMD's current top 8-core... that doesn't include re-using my video card, case and hard drives. It's not a bad option at all. May actually get a couple of the lower end ones, as both my grandmothers are due for an update, and one of them needs to get away from windows (too much crapware gets installed).
  - doktrin 14y ago
    Agreed. I would normally not consider purchasing a pre-made desktop, but this form factor does make it quite tempting. I would not feel ripped off, whereas historically I always felt Alienware machines were a little overpriced.
mehrzad 14y ago

Glyptodon 14y ago

I have a hard time believing these will have much of a market. Maybe Dell's just trying to get the jump on Valve's own Steambox?

neya 14y ago

This is interesting, but not compelling. I want: 1) Better video drivers. 2) An option to Dual-boot with another OS. 3) To remove the painful Unity interface. 4) More titles to play. And then I would buy this without a second thought. With just Ubuntu, with very little games with mediocre Graphic card drivers and a painful interface like unity (try hiding/unhiding/switching between hidden windows for example) it's hard to convince myself to buy this..

Gabler 14y ago
I can see the value to your other points, but which desktop environment would you suggest over Unity? I always thought it was a pretty good fit for these type of things but my experience with other Linux desktop environments is pretty limited.
dbbolton 14y ago
1. I actually get comparable performance with the proprietary Nvidia driver in Windows and Linux. All of these systems seem to have Nvidia chipsets. If you can't even choose your driver (at the least with jockey), I wouldn't consider buying this. 2. What would stop you from installing your own OS pair? I'd think you could do it at the very least through a network boot, and probably USB. 3. As with 3, what would stop you? Even if you're stuck with Ubuntu, changing Xsessions shouldn't be a problem. The only way this should happen to be a problem is if there is no access to a shell with root privileges. And if it that's the case, almost no serious Linux user would consider buying such an un-free system. 4. With Steam an Humble now supporting Linux, there are quite a few more choices than there were just a couple of years ago, and I'm sure we'll see more in the years to come.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Unity is probably the most intuitive system for somebody switching from Win7. What else would you install by default? Gnome2/MATE/Xfce are showing their age. Gnome3 is even stranger. The only other plausible choice would be KDE. Unity is actually pretty good as an entertainment oriented interface. The ability to search games, apps, music and movies all from the main menu is very nice.

Apocryphon 14y ago

Window 8 has really gotten the OEMs running scared.

dbecker 14y ago

I don't know anything about gaming. But I assume that means it has a great GPU as well as a solid CPU... in which case this might be a good option for those of us doing scientific computing.

TheEskimo 14y ago
Well, the "Featured Systems" tab conveniently lists the GPU. It happens to be a GeForce GTX 645 on the cheap end and a GTX 660 on the high end. A 660 costs roughly $200. In addition, if your 'scientific computing' includes hashing or any of a number of other things, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an AMD card. Overall, it's slightly overpriced. In addition, OEM hardware is invariably uncustomizable (no extra PCI-E slots, lowest end power supply possible). If you wanted to do scientific computing then there would be much more efficient options. This is no better an option (and probably worse) than other run of the mill OEM hardware. I especially like how your comment began with "I don't know anything about <related topic>. But...".
timbre 14y ago
The Geforce 600-level cards are all terrible for scientific computing, which surprised no one as Nvidia has been slowly removing CUDA features from the Geforce cards since the 200s, trying to get everyone to upgrade to Teslas.

reactor 14y ago

I think it looks promising if you have an external monitor and considering to buy the box alone for your dev/day-to-day purpose, more like an alternative to desktop. You get 1 TB additional for 50 bucks as well.

notatoad 14y ago

This seems like the sort of thing where they don't really care whether they sell any or not. Gaming on Ubuntu is a hot blog topic right now, so they took an existing product and put Ubuntu on it. Probably cost a couple thousand to do all the paperwork surrounding a new SKU, and they'll probably sell enough of these to make cover that. Boom, Free marketing and some cred with the indie gaming & Linux community. And if Steam on Linux does take off, they've already got their foot in the door. It's kind of awesome that we're at a place where releasing a Ubuntu desktop is a matter of "why not?" Rather than "why?"

kayoone 14y ago
Agreed, this probably was a minimal cost compared to the positive publicity among the tech crowd. I hope Dell is going to be more innovative in the future and tries a few things as they are no public company anymore, i guess this can only help in the long term.
- macco 14y ago
  In my oppinion Ubuntu give Dell the opportunity to differentiate from the market. A good idea would be exklusive Ubuntu machines.
Evbn 14y ago
Sort of.. We begged Dell for Linux/Ubuntu for years, and they finally give it to us.... Right after Ubuntu drove away a huge portion of their users with the Unity/Precise fiasco. Big corporations, always a lap behind.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  >drove away a huge portion of their users We have any actual data or even reasonable estimates about just what proportion they drove away?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

AmVess 14y ago

High price/low spec. No thanks. The $300 Windows RT 32GB tab offer cracks me up, though.

jcr 14y ago

http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx > Equipped with the new NVIDIA® GTX 645 graphics card Don't bother. They want you to use proprietary driver blobs without any source code for them.

xentronium 14y ago
What stops you from using nouveau drivers?
- primitur 14y ago
  The answer: nothing. His is a straw man argument. I thought this was a gaming machine, not a device-driver-development machine (why else would you need the source code?)
- jcr 14y ago
  To do hardware accelerated 3D with nouveau, you need the to use the experimental nouveau mesa driver. It kind of works for some situations, but it still unstable and incomplete. You can find details here: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/MesaDrivers http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/MesaDrivers At present, nouveau is only working in a handful of linux distributions (with or without experimental hardware accelerated 3D support). All of the other UNIX-like systems are presently unable to run nouveau (e.g. all of the BSD's) The most important issue is actually the wasted developer time. Countless hours of developer time have been wasted in the attempt to reverse engineer the proprietary binary nVidia drivers for the sake of recreating their functionality in the open source nouveau driver. If nVidia wants the business and support of open source developers and users, then they should provide all of the required specs and documentation for their hardware needed to write open source drivers.
  - xentronium 14y ago
    In the meantime, is there any ideologically better proposition suitable for gaming?

pootch 14y ago

Steam is the worst gaming platform I have ever witnessed.

liljimmytables 14y ago

It's a nifty form factor and a reasonable graphics card, I would consider getting one as a portable VR station for use with the Oculus Rift (whenever, uh, you know, Oculus release the linux SDK).