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From OS X to Ubuntu

nicolas.perriault.net

71–80 of 403 posts

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#71
post #59
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate to say it, opengl still has issues in comparison to DirectX. Just getting an opengl context is comparatively quite difficult and that still doesn't give you input or audio.

Yes, but the performance of OpenGL drivers for complex scenes has improved drastically in the past few years. nVidia is mainly to thank for that.

Also, perhaps through growing consumer exposure to mobile, it feels like the graphical (and input complexity!) expectations for games have actually dropped recently relative to their traditional acceleration or stability. It's really only high resolution FPS and strategies that demand the full capabilities of modern desktop/console-level graphics processing.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#72
post #14

Not related to the blog post but why are the websites form lenovo + dell (and acer) so god damn awful? lenovo.com redirects me to https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ since i'm currently in Sweden. I then get nice server error as greeting: 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied. If I try to access lenovo.de I get often no response... also for subsequent pages... On dells website it takes an awful lot of time to filter their lapt…

This is a really good point. I'm a lenovo guy and I've bought from their official site a couple times. It takes forever to render and the customizer is clunky.

Just give me a basic webpage with checkboxes and a price that gets auto updated.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#73
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don't want to devote lots of time to a "project" buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well. Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the "windows tax" and installing a Linux…

Can anyone point me towards the new Dell XPS 15 Developer Edition (does it exist)? I'm able to find the Windows version [0], as well as the XPS 13 Developer Edition [1], but no XPS 15 Developer edition. I just want my 15 inches. I did 13 for years and the pain still haunts me. [0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9560-laptop/pd [1] http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...

It's the Dell Precision 5510.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#74

Most important part here, and what is mostly stopping me from jumping ship is photography. Darktable is probably fantastic software, however there is number of great plugins for Lightroom that I would miss dearly.

You can virtualize or dual-boot if your photography workflow is anything like mine (mostly huge, batch-oriented). You can even use eg. VMWare unity mode to right-click to open in Lightroom in a virtualized windows or OSX instance. Performance won't be perfect but it's definitely good enough. Less so for video editing.

Personally the bigger irritation has been printer drivers. I have a Canon Pixma Pro 1 which has no drivers for Linux, forcing me to maintain out of date Windows systems to print with, at which point one can spend a thousand years defibrillating half-baked theories on color management and virtualization, or crushingly accept a partial solution.

Canon: GIVE US LINUX DRIVERS.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#75
post #21
post #11

> So, is Linux ready for the desktop? > For me, the answer is yes. Honestly it's been ready for years on the desktop (of course, this does not apply if you are an expert user in Y software only available on Z platform and need to use it for your job/company, etc...). Ubuntu 16.04 did not bring anything significant on the table, it's just that most people have not noticed. I switched full Linux back in 2009~2010 and I…

Yeah; switched my 50 year old mom to Linux three years ago. People still acting like every distro is Gentoo.

Switched my 68 yeard old mom to Linux five year ago. No complaints since that, except for video (so I upgraded CPU) and printer (cable or port is damaged, switched error handling to «cancel» instead of «pause»).

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#76
post #14

Not related to the blog post but why are the websites form lenovo + dell (and acer) so god damn awful? lenovo.com redirects me to https://www.lenovo.com/se/en/ since i'm currently in Sweden. I then get nice server error as greeting: 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied. If I try to access lenovo.de I get often no response... also for subsequent pages... On dells website it takes an awful lot of time to filter their lapt…

The other manufacturers also haven't figured out how to organize their models. As far as I can tell, Dell has just a handful of models (XPS, Precision etc.), but if you go and look at the XPS 15, for example, it's a grid of dozens of SKUs with various specs instead of just a single page with customization options. It's not even a matrix -- with models varying by CPU and RAM and disk and such, you'd expect that at lea…

I've never been a product manager but IMO it probably goes something like this:

"The framistan line is successful but I hear from our customers that we should have some options that add [x] and drop [y], while having support for more [z]."

"We need to create a new line, a totally separate brand from framistan that has way more [x], [y] but no [z] at all. The competition has entered this space and there is clearly a market there."

They say this as often as they can, iterating over various x, y, z triples and they maximize the product line, perhaps until they hear feedback like yours.

Apple, OTOH, does whatever they want, targeting limited segments in order to keep everything simple. They lose out on lots of opportunity by restricting themselves to just parts of the market. But they also have a money tree, so it doesn't really matter.

Re: nonsense model names. As a technical consumer I much prefer these very-distinct names that change with each new release. When I read a review, it's very likely that I'm reading the right review. When I'm buying used, it's very likely that I'm getting the right product. Brands like Amazon Kindle Fire, MacBook, IMO make searching for and finding the right stuff harder. I can appreciate the elegance of a simple product name, though. Typically they're concealing the true model info under some other header, but it's usually harder to identify.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#77
I went in the opposite direction. I downloaded Slackware over a 2400bud modem, and have used Linux ever since then. For a long time, Linux was my principle OS for a laptop, but occasionally using OS X on a Mac laptop.

I have mostly been retired for a long while, and usually try to limit my work time to 4 hours a day. I want that 4 hours to be as productive as possible, and right now my little MacBook is a bit more productive. Cost is not an issue.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#78
post #31

IMO if money isn't an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good. Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for >10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn't be a discussion. As far as laptops go, I've just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100%…

>I've never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless not suck, at least a little bit.

I've installed Ubuntu on probably at least 20 computers (conservative estimate) and have only had wireless suck once or twice.

I'm currently typing on an old Dell Inspiron N1440 running Ubuntu 16.04 and if I remember correctly, this is the one where wireless didn't work when I installed the OS, but I ran some updates while hardwired before I got to address the wireless issue and the updates fixed it for me.

Also special function keys work as well.

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you can still find weird wireless cards, but in practice, I've gone a decade or so (3 upgrades) without issues. A really minimal research will likely give you a fully compatible choice. Anecdata: I have a wifi extender at home just so a MacBook doesn't disconnect every few minutes. ThinkPad with Intel wifi and Linux didn't need it.

Agreed, just get a laptop with any of Intel's wifi chips and you're almost guaranteed Linux won't have a problem with it.

For Intel cards default setup works, but is not optimal, i.e. it is slow. In particular transmit aggregation is turned off by default.

`sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=8`

http://support.system76.com/articles/wireless/

Re: From OS X to Ubuntu

#80
post #75
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah; switched my 50 year old mom to Linux three years ago. People still acting like every distro is Gentoo.

Switched my 68 yeard old mom to Linux five year ago. No complaints since that, except for video (so I upgraded CPU) and printer (cable or port is damaged, switched error handling to «cancel» instead of «pause»).

I feel old now. Running Linux since 1995, everyone in my family uses it.
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