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Lubuntu is taking a new direction

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Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#111

Post by copperx »

_arvin wrote: post #38
Nition wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently replaced my main desktop PC after nine years and the new CPU benchmarks at only about twice the performance. Double the performance isn't too bad obviously, but that's about the same timespan as between the 486 and the Pentium III.

I'm right there with you guys. I made my desktop in 2014 with a Haswell i5-4670K @ 3.4GHz. Overclocked it to 4.3GHz, and I still don't have a reason to upgrade. I really want a Ryzen 2700X also but staying patient. Newer and better hardware will keep coming out so I'm in no rush. (but my next CPU will definitely be AMD) My current thing right now is compiling the Linux kernel exactly catered to my Haswell machine, an…

Can AMD Ryzen and Threadripper run Linux without crashing? What about compiling large source code bases? There were some scary bugs reported on Linux when Ryzen came out.

And that's not even covering motherboard incompatibilities with Linux (e.g. sleep/shutdown not working, WiFi/Bluetooth broken, etc.)

Have those problems been fixed definitively? Or should one stick to Intel for Linux at the moment?

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#112

Post by fbnlsr »

dooyogi wrote: post #100

Besides running on old hardware, the main benefit of distros like Lubuntu and Xubuntu is that they run well in VirtualBox without reliable GPU support. Ubuntu with Gnome 3 is almost unusable in VirtualBox.

Thanks for that comment. I've tried using Ubuntu inside VirtualBox on my brand new i7-8700 / 16 GB RAM computer and it's far from being smooth. I'll give Xubuntu a try.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#113

Post by genghizkhan »

mastrsushi wrote: post #97

I don't know if QT is part of the reason what makes KDE so sluggish, but if thats the case, Lubuntu switching to LXQT might have a lot to do with this challenge. If that's the case, I really have no idea why they're so hell bent on the transition from GTK. If love for them to migrate to JWM, but last time I checked the L in Lubuntu is for LXDE. Is there really any benefit in adopting QT or are they just following wha…

As far as I've seen, it's not. I used razor-qt when it was still an independent project and I pretty much fell in love with the idea of it. Gnome 3 was being a PITA (I remember throwing things when my artfully crafted css broke with an upgrade) and KDE hadn't crossed over into version 5. I'd tried out XFCE at that point. It didn't excite me because I didn't want to get stuck with GTK 2. I just downloaded razor-qt and realised that with a bit of spit, shine and polish, this had the potential to become what LXDE was to Gnome. I'm pretty happy about LXQT emerging from the LXDE/razor-qt merger.

Anyway, back to your question. razor-qt was pretty snappy on my machine, leading me to conclude that KDE was slow because it was KDE. Akonadi, slow animations, buggy widgets, you name it. I haven't tried KDE since then (this was back in 2012 or so), but I've heard that the latest incarnations are pretty snappy and light. Even if they aren't, I highly doubt LXQT will have any problems with lag.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#114

Post by copperx »

bubblethink wrote: post #69
devxpy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu 10.10, huh. I'm not old enough to have experienced that, but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04 They had it almost perfect and decided to throw it all out. History does repeat itself...

>but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04 Yes, 16.04 (unity 7) is peak desktop for years to come. Nothing else works quite as well for me. Luckily, you can use unity 7 with 18.04 without too much friction.

What do you use as a file manager? Ubuntu's built in one lacks the basic functions that one might expect from Windows Explorer or the Finder (e.g., the ability to rename multiple files, open folder as path in terminal, mount SMB shares, see file previews).

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#115

Post by stinos »

apatters wrote: post #57

> our main focus is shifting from (providing a distribution for old hardware) to a (functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer.) I like Lubuntu and often use it for low powered devices and sometimes devices that aren't so low powered. This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus. Here's how you sho…

functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer.

It's been a while since I checked all possible distros out there (which used to be a doable thing 2 decades ago, not so much anymore) but to me this sounds just like a whole bunch of other distros out there? So yes, not the best PR.

Here's how you should have said it: We are focusing our resources on developing a fast, clean, functional distribution for devices manufactured in the last ten years.

They could have, but it also means something different because it specifically says something about older devices. Whereas it looks like they're actively shifting away from that. I'm saying 'looks like' because honestly after reading the text I'm still not sure what exactly the plan is.. On one point the core goals don't mention anythin about 10 years, and it says should still be usable on old systems which sounds like 'well, maybe, don't care' when on the other hand it also says we will no longer primarily focus on older hardware which implies there is still some focus left. Again, yes, not the best PR as this article just creates confusion because of the wroding.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#116

Post by derefr »

chx wrote: post #16

One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obvio…

The same pair of video codecs won't magically transcode orders-of-magnitude faster on newer CPUs†, because video codecs—like crypto primitives, compression algorithms, and a few other categories—are designed, in the choices of the types of maths they do, to take advantage of the existence of certain accelerated instructions (e.g. SSE) that exist at the time of their creation. You can't make them take advantage of newer accelerated instructions (e.g. AVX-512) without it being a different algorithm.

In other words: new CPU architectures don't make old algorithms faster†. Instead, new CPU architectures enable newer, faster algorithms.

† Yes, this used to happen, in the 90s, when "new CPU" meant "appreciably higher clock speed." Nobody is making computers faster by increasing clock speeds any more, because higher clock speeds = higher power-draw and higher TDP. CPUs are now advanced by making them work smarter, not harder: accomplishing the same abstract tasks faster by providing hardware that enables newer algorithms to be used for those tasks, while using the same or less energy than the previous implementation would have used.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#117

Post by copperx »

peatmoss wrote: post #71
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services. I doubt this is the issue. KDE Plasma 5 seemed okay on FreeBSD when I tried it recently, although I don't have any recent KDE+Linux experience to compare it with. More likely there just hasn't been enough developer interest to get it properly ported to OpenBSD. Edit: To get more at your…

> I felt like there was just too much of a mismatch with the rest of the FOSS GUI ecosystem. Definitely. It probably has the largest mismatch outside of exotic options like, I don’t know, a Smalltalk image. I think that’s why the Free *nix desktop struggles to this day. We never built the core infrastructure that allowed useful inter-application messaging. We never built the application frameworks to enable a really…

I remember that I was a kid when I read the news on Slashdot that the Linux desktop experience was going to be basically a competition between Gnome and KDE.

At that moment I knew that Linux would never win on the desktop. All those wasted developer hours.

I am still heartbroken to the day. In capitalism, competition benefits the user, even if the products are virtually identical, because then they compete on price. In the free software world, competition of two indistinguishable products actively harms the user.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#118

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

mrb wrote: post #67
chx wrote: post #16

One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obvio…

« it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs » Well, the X5670 was a high-end 2P server CPU sold for $1400 ( https://ark.intel.com/products/47920/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5... ) so to fairly measure how performance has improved, you should compare it to a similarly priced product, like the AMD EPYC 7401 ( https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7401 ). And, oh, look at this: t…

Is it possible to buy a Mac Pro with an AMD EPYC 7401 CPU? Surely the fairer comparison would be against the current top-of-the-range in Apple's lineup.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#119

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

platz wrote: post #56
chx wrote: post #16

One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obvio…

What kinds of activities do you need to do video transcoding for?

Vlogging? I hear it's pretty big with the kids these days.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#120

Post by [deleted] »

hug wrote: post #9
EpicEng wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it You must not throw much at it

I cannot think of a single AAA title in recent memory that causes my i7 2600k -- an 8 year old CPU -- to struggle. It can play absolutely every single modern game, with the only component upgrade in its 8 year life being the GPU.

[deleted]
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