151–160 of 235 posts
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Chromebooks sound amazing except I don't want to be locked into Google or give them more of my data...
Personally I choose Debian, but if the alternative is getting locked into Microsoft and giving them more of my data, then I choose Google.
I freakin' love Linux as a personal workstation OS. I got into it in 1995, back in the days when Linux was punk rawk and you had to dig around on tsx-11 and sunsite to find things to run on it. I still dual-booted Windows there for a few years. Then I noticed something: Windows would, suddenly and without warning, stop working. As in, blue screen on first boot. All the way up through Windows 2000 -- 9x, NT, didn't ma…
> much like a BSD Why not try a BSD, then?
The BSDs have a few drawbacks, mainly lack of hardware support compared to Linux, which is why my NetBSD machines tend to be older or retired from "main computer" service.
On the upside, once NetBSD does support a piece of hardware, it supports it hardcore, with a well-written, well-documented driver and easy to use programmer interface. (wscons(4) is the stuff of dreams.)
If you don't have specific Windows apps, I'd be tempted to try a Chromebook these days. Around 2 years ago I got a cheap Chromebook and it was terrible. I think it was $250. Fit and finish and keyboard kind of sucked. I found one of those HP Chromebook 13 g1 boxes, which Woot had refurb for half off at just under $500, and it is much closer to the hardware experience I'm used to with Thinkpads, for 1/6th the price. N…
Why a Chromebook? Linux still works better on x86 CPUs, and I am sure there’s plenty of laptops, including inexpensive ones, that are perfectly suitable for Linux. (My current personal workhorse is a ZenBook on which I have tried Fedora, Slackware, and Ubuntu - all of which ran without issues.)
The cheap part it did meet, though that was partly because it was refurb. It's surprisingly close in hardware to my $2500 Thinkpad that work brought me, similar display resolution, similar "feel". The Chromebook was $500 refurb or would have been just under a grand new. I don't have to "maintain" it, which I appreciate since I have 100 Linux boxes I maintain at work.
My work laptop is running Ubuntu 18.10, 18.04 wouldn't install on it because it's too new. It was a fairly simple install, things mostly work on it. I do have some issues but nothing major. One thing I really hoped for was to be able to use the docking station with multiple monitors, but that isn't supported at all in Linux because of the multiplexer in it. But I can't get the chromebook to work with a USB-C to HDMI adapter either, so...
There was an interesting thread on Reddit [1] the other day which did a breakdown of the state of gaming in terms of native games and games that can be run easily via Steam Play (aka 'Proton', Valve's in-built WINE+DXVK layer). The results were quite interesting and, as one of the replies pointed out in another breakdown, Linux now competes with (and in some ways beats) gaming on macOS in terms of size of catalogue.…
As someone who has just released[1] a first access game across Windows, macOS and Linux: 10 years ago developing on linux as a game developer was way worse than windows and MacOS, now there is no real difference at all. I speak as a long time UNIX user, Linux was terrible for C++ devleopment, debugging and asset creation/viewing (compared to the others) making gamedev tougher than it needed to be. 10 years ago linux'…
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Consoles give very strict contracts that you can rely on to not change for the whole lifetime of the console. In contrary macOS changes stuff every year apparently based on what a fortune teller says for Steve Job's ghost. That means that early on, yeah it's as bad as Mac, but it gets way better over the lifetime of the console.
All the middleware that matters for professional game studios has supported Metal since for at least one year now.
And that's before getting into the release of Metal 2. There's a non zero amount of work to support it, and it's not clear how long Apple is going to support Metal 1.
And all of that is before all sorts of other crazy stuff with Apple changing their app signing requirements, messaging that they're going to require all apps to be signed by Apple in some future macOS release (but won't tell you when that is).
>once I've spent a few hours configuring everything This is what stops noobs from using it.
Whoever first brings to market a laptop with Linux that "just works" 100% from the moment you press the on button, is poised to make a lot of money. That day will probably never arrive, but it's fun to think about.
- "Trackpad on Macbook Pro is better"
- "LED 1080p screen. Why not IPS 2k screen?"
- "Wanted one but the base config is awful and I'm not paying $____ for 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD"
- "Why aren't they offering next business day support like Dell/HP/etc?"
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All the middleware that matters for professional game studios has supported Metal since for at least one year now.
Yeah, no. There's talks of Blizzard for instance dropping support for Mac. Dice has a blog post that's messaging concern. It looks like a bunch of engines are going to limp on MoltenVK which kind or imposes a weird impedance mismatch and gives weird perf issues soemtimes that you probs wouldn't see with a native Metal backend. And that's before getting into the release of Metal 2. There's a non zero amount of work to…
Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, ...
I wasn't talking about in-house solutions, rather engines that many AAA studios buy in order to actually focus on the game itself.
As for the rest of your remark, it comes up in places like HN, but not at all when attending local game developer meetups, developer articles on Making Games, Gamasutra, Connection, IGDA, or many other professional publications.
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Whoever first brings to market a laptop with Linux that "just works" 100% from the moment you press the on button, is poised to make a lot of money. That day will probably never arrive, but it's fun to think about.
The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition ships with Ubuntu and should "just work" 100% https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
My experience is that it does not.
I really have tried to use Ubuntu Destop as my daily driver after using the server varient for many years in work. It's not great for any "design" related task where I would normally jump into Adobe CC, no problem I'll just reboot to Windows for that. Until one day it just stops working... won't boot, logs you out immediately after logging in, random UI components become corrupted etc. At this point I always end up t…
I wish that instead of preaching Linux when it clearly isn't ready, we'd spend more time making it ready.
The only thing that is stopping me to jump to a linux laptop is battery life. MacOs is just optimised to a crazy extent. Nothing really comes close to the same battery performance if you don't want to get your hands dirty with tlp.
I always go with the defaults, so my hands get dirty by:
`apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw`
That's it - by default it starts, and is enabled to come up on boot. Works for me, and I far prefer Linux, even on my Macbook Air