Linux on desktop is pretty amazing. Haven't looked back in 3 years.
For the last year I ran a x200 (c2d p8400, passmark 1458) + below average ssd. Win10, almost no cruft, some cortana disabled etc.
It's ok but became worse and worse (regular pointer lag for a minute, pointer lag is very very sad and indicates very low level perf issues)
I don't use full fledged linux Desktops, if at all. I run a bare i3wm + emacs + $browser + mpv setup.
Last week I booted my old x61 (c2d l7500, passmark 967) on old intel 80GB SSD linux machine. I was stunned ..
chromium and firefox are seriously more reactive. They're only slower for graphics/video/intense workloads. emacs and git flies. Everything is tiny and leaner. Even on an older, slower cpu.
It's even mentally easier since I have less things to handle under linux (still too much to my tastes, but windows has so many components and moving pieces..)
I have to run that archlinux/i3wm setup on the x200 to get more data.
Well, it's Linux; unless you're running Gentoo, you can probably just swap the hard drive :-) Unless of course the SSD is an important part of this test.
X220/8Gb/xfce4 runs fine for my modest needs.
At one of my employers they are using Windows 10 for Education. We had some atom based small form factor desktop PCs that worked really nicely with Windows 10 just after the upgrade, but then as great grandparent post says began to become noticebly slower as the weeks and months went by. They have been replaced with i5/8Mb machines now which seem fine.
ps: btw I just did ssd swap. I'll see how the x200 does. First difference, wifi nic has a much stronger signal/bandwidth.
At work, we have a big TV screen showing an alert overview (a Grafana dashboard). A Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and Firefox would be enough to do that, but if we were to connect one to the LAN, its MAC would be blacklisted within less than a hour. (I've heard a report from a contractor plugging his own notebook into Ethernet, who had said cable ripped out by the local admin a few minutes later.) We ended up using an old notebook from one of our colleagues running Windows 7 Enterprise. Every few days, we have to RDP into it to click through app updates or restart the browser or something like that.
How do you reconcile Adobe Linux for After Effects/Photoshop/Premier with Autodesk Linux for Maya/...?
"One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging ... making binaries for Linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass. You don't make binaries for Linux, you make binaries for Fedora 19, Fedora 20, maybe even RHEL5 from 10 years ago. You make binaries for Debian Stable…well actually no, you don't make binaries for Debian Stable because Debian Stable has libraries that are so old that anything built in the last century it doesn't work. …and this [“Don't Break Userspace!”] is like, a big deal for the kernel, and I put a lot of effort into explaining to all the developers that this is a really important thing, and then all of the distributions come in, and they screw it all up. Because they break binary compatibility left and right."
--Linus Torvalds, DebConf 2014
When is that end of the day? Over the last decades it would have been extremely difficult making money with Linux dekstop software. Windows and Mac were the only viable options to run a business.
Let me ask you a quick question: How can I distribute an application in a way that will work on all Linux Desktops?
There is also work towards a more modular approach with Flatpak and Snaps, but those require support from the distro side. AppImage doesn't need any specific distro support.
It's 2018 and the Linux Desktop still doesn't have a consistent way to... well do anything now that I think about it, but that you can't even reliably distribute an application is pretty insane.
Flatpak and Snaps are a typical Linux Desktop solution: Over-engineer the shit out of it.
Beyond that, AppImage is really just a container. It is still up to the developer to bundle the necessary dependencies (libraries, runtimes, VMs, data files, etc), but this is something they'd need to do with Windows too.
What problems do you have with it?
> It is still up to the developer to bundle the necessary dependencies (libraries, runtimes, VMs, data files, etc), but this is something they'd need to do with Windows too.
Only for libraries not present in the base system. Problem with Linux Desktop world is that they seem to actively loathe the concept of a consistent base system.
It's a trick question without a clear answer.
Many people tried, noone has ever succeeded.
Linux is a very large family of operating systems, with hundreds of members and variations. It's really a meaningless term.
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1504-QHX...
AppImage/Flatpak/Snap/Docker is mostly the same idea, just executed differently.
Oh, you meant that they package the libraries with the application? Yeah. If it isn't part of the base system, they do. That's how it should work or you get DLL hell.
Problem with Linux Desktop is if you put any two of its community in a room you'd have 4 different incompatible base systems within a week.
Usually the only ones willing to pay for Linux software are enterprise shops.
Try to get a mortage, pay a monthly rent, pay the kids school,.... just with donations.
One needs a regular source of income.
Desktop users are usually not keen to pay for consulting, trainigs or documentation. Rather just paying once.
Vendors that have pushed for web solutions get a constant revenue, but that solution makes the desktop irrelevant thus regular users see no benefit in running e.g. Chrome in other OS that wasn't already installed on the hardware that they bought.
Additionally such hardware is as proprietary as it ever was, even if built with a FOSS stack, as no one gets the sauce running on the server.
Most are though.
With the open source AMD drivers.
This is useful both when debugging and when dealing with broken applications.
Edit for the audience: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
The major sticking point in that whole discussion is that Tanenbaum may have been right in principle but Minix was not a very good illustration of what a micro kernel could look like. QnX on the other hand was awesome and to this day powers a very large chunk of the embedded sphere.
Even containers are a kind of workaround for achieving the same goals.
Whether or not Windows as designed to be like QnX is immaterial, the question is what would be the better OS to serve as the engine behind a computer interacting with its users and my vote definitely goes to a real time operating system using a micro kernel. Because in my opinion that's by far the best match for that workload.
Stability, speed of interaction driver isolation and so on are much much better when using something like QnX vs a monolith. And a GUI is a real time affair.
For everything else I do use native editors.
Which is usually not the case on desktop oriented distributions.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Fractional_Scalin...
[0] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?i...
OpenJDK 9 supports HiDPI out of the box[1].
So no, I don't consider it an "edge case" if everyone in the office with a Linux laptop has the same problem
It's only an edge case on Linux because anyone trying to use such a laptop on Linux is met with pretty much unacceptable breakage and has to move away to Windows or macOS.
High dpi is important as is low dpi (for a while still at least), mixed dpi is an edge case even if you disagree.
Basically all you need is at least DisplayPort 1.2 (or 1.2a if you want Freesync) for 4K @ 60 Hz.
The RX 550 has 1.3 support, so it should handle up to 2x4K @ 60Hz with MST (daisy-chained or with a splitter) or a single 5K @ 60Hz.
Some 4K monitors can also work with 2×HDMI, but I don’t think you’ll find that on any low-end card. Maybe high-end used.
As for actual performance, there is a huge gap between what you need for gaming and what you need for office work.
A low-level graphics card from few generations ago with 1GB of VRAM would be fine even (like Quadro 2000), except that it will only be able to drive the display at 30 Hz.
The biggest gotcha with a 4K display is actually your host RAM. If you try to run anything like GIMP, Photoshop, or vector editors in particular, it will gobble up much more memory than usual. Your regular web browser will as well, though to a much lesser degree.
Getting something just a little better, like an RX 560, might be a good idea though, this gives you enough GPGPU power to run most expensive video filters and scalers at native 4K[2].
[1] My Apollo Lake netbook with an entry-level iGPU can handle a 3K display easy
[2] Your source material might be 1080p but you end up postprocessing it at 4K. This might surprise some people.
I highly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone just starting out.
There's small UI affordances I miss, there's no MS Office (which is becoming less of a problem for sure), Spotify is iffy, etc etc. So many small things that add up.
Finally - Windows Susbsytem for Linux, or whatever it's called, has really made CLI work on Windows painless. With oh my zsh and CMDer I can do just about everything I can on my Ubuntu machines. Even though Windows 10 or MacOS aren't perfect, the pain isn't quite great enough for me to seriously make a change.
The problem is that when you hit one of these issues it's infuriating and often costs a lot of time. It also has a way of happening when you really don't want it to, since when you're traveling or in a hurry you're more likely to be doing "different" things with your machine and thus are more likely to hit a problem. Linux desktops are like a car that runs great for your daily commute but blows up on road trips.
IMHO the reason for this is that the remaining 5-10% of the polish that's required to reach excellence in software often takes >50% of the time and is by far the least fun part of programming. As a result people generally have to be paid to do it. Free software rarely does unless it's heavily sponsored or incubated in-house by someone with resources.
This is why I still like Mac. I think Apple as a company is a little past its prime but Mac still offers by far the most reliable and consistently productive desktop experience. Windows has improved but they've decided to encrust it with advertising. Ads in a paid app or OS are a total deal breaker. Windows also still has more edge case issues than Mac, mostly due to driver issues.
Linux on the desktop has always been a niche experience for a niche audience. ChromeOS and Android (both based on Linux) are mainstream desktop experiences, as are MacOS, iOS, and Windows.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProced...
Someone should tell Ubuntu that this is no longer needed.
Works with Linux out of the box as Dell made all of the driver's work for their developer edition's in Ubuntu. Battery life and and the 3200x1800 screen are phenomenal. Well made and Dell's warranty process is actually fairly good. It's no Apple warranty, but does the job.
I bought a Lenovo Carbon X1 4th gen a few months ago. I was originally going to keep a Windows partition, but wiped Windows 10 Home after about 20 min. The fresh install of Linux Mint was even simpler than expected. I’ve been really enjoying Linux ever since, with the only issue being the HiDPI support mentioned elsewhere ... a 1.5x would be perfect and once that happens, I’d recommend my build even to my parents who are long-time mac/windows users.
The only problem I had I might blame Linux for was that it randomly dropped the connection to my Bluetooth headset, and it took a reboot to connect the headset again.
Back in the late 90s there were genuine hurdles to do with Linux desktops, my 1999 desktop didn't work in X with redhat 5.2 because of the graphics card.
Today's when most productivity programs are web based, and so much more is cross platform, its far easier to run Linux than windows.
(I exclusively used Linux on the desktop from 1995 until I bought my first Mac in 2002).