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Elementary OS

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Re: Elementary OS

#391

Post by rpazyaquian »

htns wrote: post #361
rpazyaquian wrote: post #360

I'm seeing a whooole lot of posts about laptop hardware poorly supporting Linux distributions in this thread. I've been considering moving to a Linux-based laptop for basic computing once my old MBP inevitably dies a horrible death, but these reports about poor hardware interfacing, broken features, missing drivers, etc. is making me less interested in doing so. Is this really such a widespread problem?

If you go for an obscure distro it is. Ubuntu has good hardware support.

I'll likely go for Ubuntu just because it's the most accessible choice right now, and the distro I'm most used to. In my case, is there a reason why I should go to other distros? I'm mostly used to distros like Arch, CoreOS, etc. being used for production servers and other specialized hardware over personal computing.

Re: Elementary OS

#392

Post by eth0up »

fernandotakai wrote: post #384
eth0up wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Deb on a macbook 4,1 from 2008. Camera doesn't work though. What year is your mackbook? I configured this one last week for a friend who had it laying around in the closet for years with a locked password and no particular interest in Macs. I convinced them to nix the MacOS and try Linux, arguing it would perform more efficiently, and compared to the MacOS version previously installed, it very much does. And te…

i used the native osx disk utility to create a partition. i'm using archlinux on a mid-2012 macbook pro. which kernel were you installing?

I'm not sure; it was an old Debian Stable dvd, from early last year. And the first thing I did was change the repos to Unstable and do a dist-upgrade. The kernel release is presently 4.7.0-1-amd64. It was all a fairly annoying task to begin with a blank hard-drive and end with a usable system, but it was pretty neat when I got it. It's a usable system now, with a few minor bugs.

Re: Elementary OS

#393

Post by htns »

rpazyaquian wrote: post #391
htns wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go for an obscure distro it is. Ubuntu has good hardware support.

I'll likely go for Ubuntu just because it's the most accessible choice right now, and the distro I'm most used to. In my case, is there a reason why I should go to other distros? I'm mostly used to distros like Arch, CoreOS, etc. being used for production servers and other specialized hardware over personal computing.

IMHO Qubes (https://www.qubes-os.org/) is the only desktop distro with worthwhile differentiation. Most of the other distros' gimmicks fall under "who cares" if you just want to browse the web and program.

Re: Elementary OS

#394

Post by matzipan »

skriticos2 wrote: post #367
matzipan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! For example, Skylake support is not mature enough in Linux atm.

I'm writing this from a Kaby Lake (7th gen) I5 running Fedora 24 and it shipped with Ubuntu (Dell XPS). It does require the newest packages but I don't see any major issues. My Skylake (6th gen) NUC I5 works well with Fedora 24 too. Mind to elaborate what specific problems you have with them?

It's been linked many times around here: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html

I'm still seeing powersaving issues even on Haswell. I believe basic support for Skylake only shipped in Ubuntu LTS only recently, too.

Re: Elementary OS

#395

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

greggman wrote: post #281

I am really intruigued when people say they do most of their computer usage on an iPad. I get massively frustrated anytime I try to do almost anything other than consome on an iPad. As just one example trying to copy snd paste almost anything makes me want to tear my hair out it's so frustrsting. Moving the cursor or trying to fight with the os about what I really want to select as it keeps trying to expand my select…

Same here. I bought an iPad a few generations ago and it was noticeably slower than even my iPhone. If your iPad is slower (even a little bit) than your iPhone, you will hate your iPad. Not to mention, anything involving multitasking or juggling several different things at once becomes a frustrating experience on the iPad.

Anything I would have gotten done on my iPad, I could have just done on my iPhone. And if I can't use my iPhone for it, I would have used a real computer.

Re: Elementary OS

#396

Post by rcarmo »

greggman wrote: post #281

I am really intruigued when people say they do most of their computer usage on an iPad. I get massively frustrated anytime I try to do almost anything other than consome on an iPad. As just one example trying to copy snd paste almost anything makes me want to tear my hair out it's so frustrsting. Moving the cursor or trying to fight with the os about what I really want to select as it keeps trying to expand my select…

I have absolutely zero issues of that nature on iOS - it can be a bit fiddly to get the hang of positioning the selection handles, and moving the cursor using the soft keyboard is a relatively recent feature, but it's _miles_ ahead of Android.

Re: Elementary OS

#397

Post by staticelf »

coldpie wrote: post #336
staticelf wrote: post #333

I use linux on my laptop at work. It is running Red Hat. I have many issues and as always with Linux one of them is bad graphics drivers. Basically every time I've tried desktop Linux (which is many times) I have always, always struggled with graphics drivers. Even if I get it to work fine, they always suck compared with a Windows installation. Last year I ran desktop Linux and first I had Linux installed and ran CS:…

Just curious, what graphics hardware were you using? Intel? Nvidia? ATI? I've used Intel and Nvidia extensively and had very few, if any, issues. Intel's drivers are open source, integrated with Linux, and fantastic. Nvidia performance is indeed worse than on Windows, but not enough for me to care. ATI is a mess and has been for more than a decade. Don't use ATI if you want to use Linux.

Mainly nvidia, I have used their linux drivers but they just aren't as good in my opinion. Last time I tried was with a couple of years old graphics card.

It works with nvidia, but as soon as you have multiple monitors or do heavy gaming the faults are there and it's obvious that they don't put in the same effort as in their windows drivers.

Re: Elementary OS

#398

Post by krylon »

metafunctor wrote: post #248
mavelikara wrote: post #9

My mini Ask HN: After over a decade of using Mac OS X, I am considering switching to Linux for my dev laptop. The tools I worry about are those that interact with audio and webcam - Go To Meeting, Google Hangout etc. My work involves me having to teleconf with others often. Does anyone here have experience using Linux well in such scenarios. If so, what hardware are you using? Also, does sleep-on-closing-lid work wel…

This is why I still choose to go with Mac OS X, even if their most recent hardware is very, very expensive. I don't have time to tinker with compiling kernels, configuring X11, figuring out which photo management software to use, setting up reliable backups, getting my Bluetooth headset to work, and, yes, getting the machine to suspend when I close the lid and wake up when I open it. These are basics that will just w…

For reasonably popular hardware, compiling kernels or configuring X.org has been a thing of the past for years (unless one really wants to).

Since you are asking for specifics, I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook UX 305, and with the exception of keyboard backlight, all the builtin hardware works as expected. I have never tried to attach an external display. I did not try Ubuntu on this machine, the Debian installer pretty much bailed on me. (Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro, so the amount of updates it receives can be slightly annoying at times, OTOH the software is very much up to date.) I have to admit I have not tried suspending the machine by closing the lid, but Fn+F1 works reliably.

Re: Elementary OS

#399

Post by rcarmo »

cooper12 wrote: post #246
rcarmo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a blog, it's a Wiki ( https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy ), and the blog just hangs off it. I see no damning in that - you can always either not visit or not click :)

Then you gotta warn us in the title that you link everything :). Just kidding, but on a more serious note I also found it very distracting. Sure, link the first occurrence of the word, but I see no reason macOS needs to be linked every time it's mentioned. Even the big daddy of wikis, Wikipedia, recommends against linking things that have already been linked and very common terms [0]: > An overlinked article contains…

I'm testing out a little JS to hide all but the first link of each kind (it makes sense for the anchors to stick around to do internal reference counting). Will be up soon.
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