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Comment by julianj | Hacker News Reader

Give Ubuntu desktop a try. The installer allows you to run the OS live without installation. You can use this to see if Ubuntu is something you may be interested in.

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+1 for this. Try before you "buy" so to speak. In a very similar vein, Linux Mint also allows you to do this. Both OSes work very well out of the box and there are large communities for help.

My experience with Ubuntu (xubuntu 16.04.x) is that you really need a modern Nvidia card to get high/native resolution. Especially for someone who wants to run 3 monitors.

I have a small underpowered desktop running in my house that only has onboard graphics and it runs Ubuntu 16.04 just fine, but its only connected to 1 monitor, not 3.

The Intel integrated graphic card of my laptop does handle 3 screens fine and I dont need to mess with drivers, everything works well out of the box. I would actually advise against NVIDIA cards unless you need powerful graphic processing or to do GPU computation.

Cool. Didn't know laptops existed with 3 monitor ports. Which model laptop are you using, and would you recommend it for programming? :)

Ahhh, doing some Googling shows it's from add-on peripherals and/or docking stations. eg:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln115952/...

Don't you need an at-least-mediocre GPU to get high resolution on 3 monitors on any OS? I wouldn't connect 3 high resolution monitors to a Windows or Mac machine with no GPU.

Modern machines that seemingly have "no GPU" have an integrated GPU that's powerful enough for driving multiple monitors, desktop compositing and rendering some 3D (modern games at 720p, older games at higher resolution).

Does AMD do this or is that still just an Intel thing?

AMD's APUs are actually more powerful than almost all Intel iGPUs. The only one that's competitive is Iris Pro 580 with the eDRAM addon, known in a previous incarnation as Crystalwell (not all Iris Pro 580s have this).

The tradeoff is that the CPU half of AMD's processors is kinda bad - they are all derived from either Jaguar laptop processors or Bulldozer, they desperately need to be refreshed with Ryzen. So Intel has the better CPU but a mediocre GPU (unless you splash out for Crystalwell), and AMD has mediocre CPUs but a good GPU...

AMD's non-APU processors (FX, Ryzen, TR, Epyc) do not have iGPUs however, same goes for Intel's lines of server chips (X99/X299/etc). This is something that is only in "client" processors.

Aren't you still limited by the number of HDMI ports anyway?

This Ubuntu user here is driving a 27" 4k Dell with an AMD RX460 that doesn't even have a fan. Works okay.

I'll add the caveat that for HiDPI displays you're still likely to run into scaling issues, particularly if you have differently sized displays. I hear that for some specific cases Ubuntu/Gnome 3 handle things acceptably, but there's still a lot of rough edges (not that Windows doesn't still have problems here too).

This is true. I just installed Ubuntu on a shiny new (to me) Precision 5510 laptop. 4k monitor native. When I hooked it to my 27 inch, 2560x1440 monitor, the scaling became a disaster between the two screens. Setting the scale on the fly can also be a disaster. Best thing I have found is to set the res down on the higher-res monitor, and set the scaling to the same on both monitors. Or just never move things between monitors.

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