8 ms·

Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. I have not done any tinkering for a long time. But the Yosemite upgrade on laptop brought back my memories of initial

by prapam2 12y ago

Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. I have not done any tinkering for a long time. But the Yosemite upgrade on laptop brought back my memories of initial Ubuntu distributions. I had disable few setting to get some performance. I had to change few UI setting to get a decent look. It looks a transition phase OS.But ubuntu on that m/c had few touch pad issues otherwise it would have been the default OS for me on the laptop.

morganvachon 12y ago
> Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. It is...until it isn't. Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch, with no weird issues or regressions, and a warm, friendly, comfortable development environment welcomes you. Then there's that one time you install it on your laptop so you have a to-go environment that matches your workstation, and BOOM! your wifi isn't recognized (what year is it again??) or your sound card sputters (damn you PulseAudio!), or your hybrid graphics screws the pooch. Hell, I built this workstation I'm typing on with GNU/Linux and BSD compatibility first in my mind, and I still had issues with some hardware right off the bat. Nothing that can't be fixed with some fiddling, but it's annoying as hell. Yes, all of the above issues can be fixed, just like the issues you dealt with in OS X. It's a computer, after all; Garbage In (Apple/Linux/BSD developers), Garbage Out. And don't get me started on Windows 8.x; it's finally becoming usable daily, but there are a million reasons I chose to stick with 7 for Windows-specific work, and wait it out until 10 ships. Apple broke the cardinal rule: If it isn't broken, stop fixing it! They want to innovate and improve and conquer the world, fine; but they need to remember that they had the best OS X release with Snow Leopard (and in my personal opinion, that was the best desktop OS period). In their rush to wow the masses, they broke their OS for those of us who use it to be productive and creative. At this stage, I feel that a good old fashioned, stable OS like FreeBSD or Slackware Linux or Debian is the best choice for a solid 'nix workstation, something you can get real work done on. But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac.
- prapam2 12y ago
  More wifi then Sound were common for me before don't have them now. Actually i face these issues when doing a fresh installation of Win7. Many times i had use Ubuntu to find windows drivers! My Macbook pro Ubuntu installation went without any problems. Touch pad mouse clicks weren't as exact as OS X. I am used to it hence was not able to use Ubuntu. Maybe i should tinker a bit.
  - morganvachon 12y ago
    On this particular machine I'm using, some distros have excellent sound out of the box and some require snoop=0 added to the snd_hda_intel options in /etc/module.d/ to avoid stuttering audio. I didn't discover this bug until after I'd bought the motherboard and tried various distros; in my research it never came up. And on a completely different note, I have a Dell Latitude laptop from around 2000 or so, a Pentium III machine, that has no built in networking unless you count the dial-up modem. I picked up a random CardBus wifi card for $5, and OpenBSD recognized and configured it flawlessly. It really all comes down to whether the OS developers have access to the hardware the rest of us use. If, for example, your wifi doesn't work, it's not likely to until enough bug reports are submitted that the kernel hackers responsible for wifi drivers get their hands on the hardware and write or improve a driver. It's the same for those trackpad issues you had; someone somewhere has to debug that. This is why it's a good idea to research your hardware if you intend to run anything other than Windows or OS X. And even with research, it's rarely 100% working out of the box. That's the tradeoff for having what (in my opinion) is a very productive and comfortable working environment.
- MrDom 12y ago
  I dual boot windows and ubuntu. They both have their good points and their bad points. > Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch Even when the installs go off without a hitch, there are always lingering pain in the ass problems and they're all related to buggy drivers, bad UI tools and dependency hell. Every time I think about making my own distro, I come back to those three big problems and think: the last two are fixable. The drivers... not so much.
smikims 12y ago
I don't know how it is on Macs (probably worse), but on my Lenovo Y50 I've had a lot of issues getting my nVidia card to work properly. First I tried Arch Linux, which I had been using on my previous machine for about 2 years now, and no matter what I did I couldn't get my nVidia card to work properly, even with the nvidia-beta package from the AUR. So then I tried Ubuntu, thinking that would be the "easy" distro. It installed alright, but the nVidia card was still giving me trouble and the official Ubuntu nVidia packages weren't new enough (it's a GTX 860M). So I added a PPA with a newer version of the driver and that seemed to get it working at least, but I still had massive screen tearing issues, and for some reason the nVidia settings app had far fewer settings than the Windows version I have on the other partition, and it didn't even have an option to enable vsync, which should resolve the tearing. After trawling through mountains of nVidia documentation and forum posts, including, no joke, the EBNF for their config file, I still can't get the damn thing to work. I'd like to have a real shell and be able to play games without rebooting, but the polish on desktop Linux still isn't quite there yet. And yes, I know this particular problem isn't the fault of Linux or any of the other software in Ubuntu, but it's a problem with the ecosystem and it's one that's preventing me from using Linux as much as I'd like to right now.
- davvid 12y ago
  If you export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1 in your environment then that should force the nvidia driver to sync to vblank.
  - smikims 12y ago
    That was one of the things I tried and somehow it still didn't do it. Setting it in the individual games' settings didn't to it either. I'll try one more time though.
    - vacri 12y ago
      I assume the PPA you added was xorg-edgers? I needed to use that one to get my nvidia card working (was quite a new model when I got it...)
  - 12y ago

by prapam2 12y ago

morganvachon 12y ago

> Desktop Linux is mostly install an work. It is...until it isn't. Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch, with no weird issues or regressions, and a warm, friendly, comfortable development environment welcomes you. Then there's that one time you install it on your laptop so you have a to-go environment that matches your workstation, and BOOM! your wifi isn't recognized (what year is it again??) or your sound card sputters (damn you PulseAudio!), or your hybrid graphics screws the pooch. Hell, I built this workstation I'm typing on with GNU/Linux and BSD compatibility first in my mind, and I still had issues with some hardware right off the bat. Nothing that can't be fixed with some fiddling, but it's annoying as hell. Yes, all of the above issues can be fixed, just like the issues you dealt with in OS X. It's a computer, after all; Garbage In (Apple/Linux/BSD developers), Garbage Out. And don't get me started on Windows 8.x; it's finally becoming usable daily, but there are a million reasons I chose to stick with 7 for Windows-specific work, and wait it out until 10 ships. Apple broke the cardinal rule: If it isn't broken, stop fixing it! They want to innovate and improve and conquer the world, fine; but they need to remember that they had the best OS X release with Snow Leopard (and in my personal opinion, that was the best desktop OS period). In their rush to wow the masses, they broke their OS for those of us who use it to be productive and creative. At this stage, I feel that a good old fashioned, stable OS like FreeBSD or Slackware Linux or Debian is the best choice for a solid 'nix workstation, something you can get real work done on. But ever since Lion was released, I would rather use Windows Vista on a Core Solo machine than OS X on any Mac.

prapam2 12y ago
More wifi then Sound were common for me before don't have them now. Actually i face these issues when doing a fresh installation of Win7. Many times i had use Ubuntu to find windows drivers! My Macbook pro Ubuntu installation went without any problems. Touch pad mouse clicks weren't as exact as OS X. I am used to it hence was not able to use Ubuntu. Maybe i should tinker a bit.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  On this particular machine I'm using, some distros have excellent sound out of the box and some require snoop=0 added to the snd_hda_intel options in /etc/module.d/ to avoid stuttering audio. I didn't discover this bug until after I'd bought the motherboard and tried various distros; in my research it never came up. And on a completely different note, I have a Dell Latitude laptop from around 2000 or so, a Pentium III machine, that has no built in networking unless you count the dial-up modem. I picked up a random CardBus wifi card for $5, and OpenBSD recognized and configured it flawlessly. It really all comes down to whether the OS developers have access to the hardware the rest of us use. If, for example, your wifi doesn't work, it's not likely to until enough bug reports are submitted that the kernel hackers responsible for wifi drivers get their hands on the hardware and write or improve a driver. It's the same for those trackpad issues you had; someone somewhere has to debug that. This is why it's a good idea to research your hardware if you intend to run anything other than Windows or OS X. And even with research, it's rarely 100% working out of the box. That's the tradeoff for having what (in my opinion) is a very productive and comfortable working environment.
MrDom 12y ago
I dual boot windows and ubuntu. They both have their good points and their bad points. > Nine out of ten Ubuntu or Mint installs will go off without a hitch Even when the installs go off without a hitch, there are always lingering pain in the ass problems and they're all related to buggy drivers, bad UI tools and dependency hell. Every time I think about making my own distro, I come back to those three big problems and think: the last two are fixable. The drivers... not so much.

smikims 12y ago

I don't know how it is on Macs (probably worse), but on my Lenovo Y50 I've had a lot of issues getting my nVidia card to work properly. First I tried Arch Linux, which I had been using on my previous machine for about 2 years now, and no matter what I did I couldn't get my nVidia card to work properly, even with the nvidia-beta package from the AUR. So then I tried Ubuntu, thinking that would be the "easy" distro. It installed alright, but the nVidia card was still giving me trouble and the official Ubuntu nVidia packages weren't new enough (it's a GTX 860M). So I added a PPA with a newer version of the driver and that seemed to get it working at least, but I still had massive screen tearing issues, and for some reason the nVidia settings app had far fewer settings than the Windows version I have on the other partition, and it didn't even have an option to enable vsync, which should resolve the tearing. After trawling through mountains of nVidia documentation and forum posts, including, no joke, the EBNF for their config file, I still can't get the damn thing to work. I'd like to have a real shell and be able to play games without rebooting, but the polish on desktop Linux still isn't quite there yet. And yes, I know this particular problem isn't the fault of Linux or any of the other software in Ubuntu, but it's a problem with the ecosystem and it's one that's preventing me from using Linux as much as I'd like to right now.

davvid 12y ago
If you export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1 in your environment then that should force the nvidia driver to sync to vblank.
- smikims 12y ago
  That was one of the things I tried and somehow it still didn't do it. Setting it in the individual games' settings didn't to it either. I'll try one more time though.
  - vacri 12y ago
    I assume the PPA you added was xorg-edgers? I needed to use that one to get my nvidia card working (was quite a new model when I got it...)
- 12y ago