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I Miss BSD/Linux

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Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#211

Post by srazzaque »

bitsandboots wrote: post #85
srazzaque wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At home, I no longer dual-boot because I vm. Curious, do you have a Windows host and Linux guest(s)? Or the other way around? I currently have Linux as my primary with a Windows guest OS for when I need it (e.g. Office - I actually think Excel is great - or if I'm doing any Win32/C++ dev). But, I'm thinking of doing it the other way around on my next PC.

Windows host, because I play VR games and GPU passthrough would be inconvenient. I just fullscreen the linux VM and it feels native for all the non-3D tasks I do with it. Even media viewing is a breeze.

Makes sense!

What's the current best virtualisation software on Windows in your opinion?

I tried searching online for this. And quickly realised that highly ranked sites targeting Windows users are quite low quality.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#212

Post by RGamma »

jwells89 wrote: post #181
MarkusWandel wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the "Year of the Laptop" happened ages ago. Everything from old clunkers to a relatively modern HP Elitebook 840 G6... install Fedora, done. I think the fingerprint reader might be tough, and Bluetooth on Linux is truly a sad state of affairs. But everything else works out of the box, and that includes suspend/resume and other power management, the special keys, Wifi and so on. WebGL just works, no need to twe…

For whatever it’s worth, newer Intel wifi/bluetooth chipsets (e.g. AX200 or AX210) have consistently worked very well for me under Linux. If your EliteBook has a socketed wifi/BT card, it might be worth buying an Intel card (they’re dirt cheap) and installing it. My issue with battery life isn’t getting it to match what it is under Windows, but that x86 ultraportables tend to have disappointing battery life under eit…

Wonder whether you've ever experienced this problem: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709 (spurious wifi disconnects due to "beacon loss" on Intel cards, been open for 5 years). There were two good blog posts summarizing the situation around that bug but can't find them anymore.

It's been really annoying with my Intel wifi/bt CNVi card for years and there's a lot of people having similar problems...

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#213

Post by Wowfunhappy »

> Why don’t [I] install the Fedora Asahi Remix on [my] ARM64 machine? Because it doesn’t support USB-C display nor the microphone or Touch ID.

Yes, those are the few things left that still don't work. I bet they will in another year.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#214

Post by TheRoque »

hnlmorg wrote: post #194
TheRoque wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a good point, however when it comes to GPUs, you might not have an optimal choice at all, since some stuff come only on NVidia GPUs. However, after the GTX 1080 they released open source drivers and things should be better for more recent versions.

Unless you’re doing CUDA, almost nothing requires Nvidia GPUs specifically. And in the case of CUDA, that’s already really well supported on Linux.

My point was different, the parent was saying "pick the right GPU then". But if I pick AMD I don't have Cuda, and if I use NVidia I have CUDA but buggy graphics. Some other features might or not be well supported by Linux depending on your GPU and the driver (e.g. You might be force to used Xorg). So yeah it's kind of a mess and you have to have everything aligned (Driver, GPU and use cases) to have a flawless experience.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#215

Post by lproven »

tracker1 wrote: post #179
skydhash wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux Mint is basically what Windows should have been. An OS for productive use. Defaults are good enough that you’re almost never tempted to change them. Just install your software and do work. XP (SP3?) was it and Win7 was it too. Everything after that is fighting against you. macOS is close too, but there’s a couple of painful points. Some basic windows management (solved by rectangle), iCloud doing too many thing…

I realize this... I was suggesting that Pop is every bit as ready to use as Mint.

How long have you got?

• The tiling is clunky, and underneath it's still GNOME, my #1 most hated Linux desktop.

• systemd-boot is clunky, does not play well with others, does not dual boot well at all, and it needs a huge ESP yet does not supply tooling to resize the ESP -- and Gparted can't resize FAT32 partitions as small as the typical ESP.

• It replaces Snap with Flatpak, which is not an improvement in any meaningful way: the only advocates who bleat that it's more open don't understand what the word means, and architecturally, OStree is a Lovecraftian horror.

• The installer is poor and could not handle using an existing `/home` partition when I first tried it (although that did get fixed). It is co-developed with Elementary, which is remarkable because the Elementary one worked better. They'd be better off learning what openness really means and working with Calamares instead.

• In summary, it shows many of the defects you'd expect from a distro designed by a hardware manufacturer: poor installation, poor handling of dual boot, poor handling of existing partitions, and poor handling of being put on an existing machine, especially an older one.

I find its advocates don't dual boot, don't use older kit, don't do complex partitioning, and so don't notice its defects and are unmoved because the problems do not affect them.

Gracefully handling interop and existing tech is one of the things Linux does best, far better than the BSDs for instance, and it is exactly where Pop OS falls down.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#216

Post by bitsandboots »

srazzaque wrote: post #211
bitsandboots wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows host, because I play VR games and GPU passthrough would be inconvenient. I just fullscreen the linux VM and it feels native for all the non-3D tasks I do with it. Even media viewing is a breeze.

Makes sense! What's the current best virtualisation software on Windows in your opinion? I tried searching online for this. And quickly realised that highly ranked sites targeting Windows users are quite low quality.

Sadly, vmware, which scares me now that broadcom owns it. It's had the best balance of seamless + good-enough graphics performance (for media, not games)

My personal rank is

vmware

virtualbox

qemu

I never tried hyper-v by itself. vmware actually can use hyper-v as a hypervisor if its enabled (as you need it when using WSL), but its inferior to using vmware's own solution, as I end up with weird networking behavior. it does work though.

I think on linux qemu may be the best, but on windows it is rough. I think vmware just has better video technology and better integration technology, such that its easy to copy-paste files, share clipboards, full screen etc.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#217

Post by bitsandboots »

vundercind wrote: post #96
bitsandboots wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows host, because I play VR games and GPU passthrough would be inconvenient. I just fullscreen the linux VM and it feels native for all the non-3D tasks I do with it. Even media viewing is a breeze.

My experience has been that Linux is significantly more stable under a VM on Windows or Mac than directly on all but the most conservative hardware. Fewer weird multimedia glitches, no needing to involve any part of the Linux wireless stack of any kind (Bluetooth especially, but also WiFi), fewer video driver issues, fewer program or windowing system crashes.

I know, I've nearly forgotten all compatibility woes!

When I made my linux vm, I actually just took a real linux system's drive and told vmware to just use the drive as-is.

So, it was really convenient to no longer have to deal with driver nonsense, while retaining the original disk.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#218

Post by gizmo »

skydhash wrote: post #176
tracker1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been pretty happy with Pop (downstream from Debian/Ubuntu) myself. Not sure why it doesn't get much love compared to say Mint.

Linux Mint is basically what Windows should have been. An OS for productive use. Defaults are good enough that you’re almost never tempted to change them. Just install your software and do work. XP (SP3?) was it and Win7 was it too. Everything after that is fighting against you. macOS is close too, but there’s a couple of painful points. Some basic windows management (solved by rectangle), iCloud doing too many thing…

Font rendering (kerning specifically) is horrific. Scaling for 4k monitors doesn't work right. Multimonitor doesn't work properly. Paddings/margins, font sizes, and icons are all over the place and lack consistency/polish.

It also doesn't have a reliable backup system included (rsync is not reliable; backups should use snapshots) and you can't roll back system updates if something breaks (which will happen). Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.

Linux isn't all bad but if you expect things to Just Work you'll be sorely disappointed.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#219

Post by klondike_klive »

INTPenis wrote: post #148
thrownawayjests wrote: post #53

After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser. For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new up…

The worst thing about windows booting up is being lied to that the system is ready to use, when in fact everything is still sluggish for another 2 minutes and default apps are starting up. While on my Linux computer I consistently can immediately start using the system once I've logged in.

Not to mention all the focus-stealing from apps that I can't work without.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#220

Post by fullspectrumdev »

jmclnx wrote: post #77
pjmlp wrote: post #16

Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops. Sure, the situation has improved a lot, but they still require compromises of not having everything supported like on desktop PCs, even when buying from Linux OEMs, my experience hasn't been that great. For a brief period, netbooks seemed to be on track, but then they suffered multiple attacks…

>Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops What does mature mean ? Unless you mean an entertainment or gaming device, I find for real computing, Linux/BSD is 100x better than Windows or MACs. For entertainment a TV, Cell Phone, tablet is a better choice.

It depends. I would have had the same opinion as you until recently when I switched to an M2 for travel work, and it is completely adequete for getting work done.

There’s a handful of edge cases where I’ll fire up the real Linux laptop, but between UTM and Parallels I can get a lot of real work done on the MacBook.

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