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Lubuntu is taking a new direction

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Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not old enough? Well this makes me feel old even though I'm not. I'm 22 and my first version of Ubuntu was 8.04.

I'm guessing they got into using linux later in life. Not all of us messed with linux when we were 12 ;)

When I was 12, it was all windows 3.1, IBM OS/2 and Solaris for the cool cats.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#63
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…

Design imperatives change too, though. The old machine probably had 3x the power draw. A 4-5x improvement in instructions per joule is nothing to sneeze at. Frankly there are laptops that compete reasonably well with that old space heater.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#64
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…

There is also a ~33% decrease in power usage. So a i7-8700 which also has a similar score now has 65W TDP vs a 95W TDP. Since moores law is leveling off, programming skill & quality will become more important to extract more performance out of computers. I forsee less javascript and python and more golang, java & rust and other %100 statically typed languages in the future.

And a return to hand-optimized assembly! I knew this day would come, when my skills would be in demand once again!

Like client-server vs local, progress is a cycle.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a ~33% decrease in power usage. So a i7-8700 which also has a similar score now has 65W TDP vs a 95W TDP. Since moores law is leveling off, programming skill & quality will become more important to extract more performance out of computers. I forsee less javascript and python and more golang, java & rust and other %100 statically typed languages in the future.

A language's documentation, ease of use, and community are all far more important than CPU performance. Point me to one java project on Github with >1000 stars and I'll give you a hundred Python and JS projects.

High quality TV shows are more popular than oxygen. Unless oxygen runs out.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#66

As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to believe that it could. The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends on, but man it’s c…

Honestly I remember trying gnustep, it was ugly. I can't even emphasis how terrible it looked from a ux/UI perspective compared to literally every other desktop.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#67
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: the SPECint_rate "h264ref" benchmark subcomponent, which measures multithreaded video encoding performance, shows a 4.2× improvement (472 to 2000):

• X5670: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100...

• EPYC 7401: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q4/cpu2006-20171...

Edit: oops, fixed major screw up. I had linked to SPECint numbers, instead of SPECint_rate. The real improvement is 4.2× not 45×! Far from what Moore's Law predicts (2^(8/1.5)) but still a very notable improvement. I'm sure your friend would be happy to transcode 4× faster...

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#69
post #41

I don't want to come across as ungrateful but I'm not very happy about this. I haven't looked into the reasons for this change but I'm sure there are some compelling ones to make such a big change. LXDE based Lubuntu struck the perfect balance (for me) between: - Being minimal and lightweight - but works out of the box with enough batteries included - tons of community resources due to being a ~buntu - very, very cus…

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.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#70
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…

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