[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Anthem

Yeah, new kernels and various platform updates tend to have dramatic effects on various bits of hardware. With the slowly/quickly developing state of graphics hardware in the GNU/Linux world it can be difficult to get things just right. (Unless you go straight Intel hardware. I think there is the best driver/kernel support for Intel right now with their active participation in development. For Linux oriented systems, I buy all Intel hardware now.)

I sympathize but I'd be reluctant. Intel is heavily involved in Linux and sees that their hardware is well supported. But while Intel is many things, a maker of top video graphics adapters isn't one of them.

I just installed a graphics card in the machine I'm using at the moment - it came with Intel onboard graphics. That works well enough for some things, but Intel 3D performance sucks. (Which is actually a bit surprising, given Intel's technical skill. I suspect their attitude is "We make CPUs and supporting chipsets. We'll make graphics hardware good enough to let the user use the system till they install a better video adapter, and sell it to motherboard makers for onboard video, but it's not really our business.")

I'm not a heavy gamer, so I didn't need the latest whiz bang GFX card with 4GB on card RAM and a faster GPU than my CPU. I picked up an ASUS HD 5450 Silent low profile card with a gig of onboard RAM. The ASUS card is based on an ATI design. Performance in things like Google Earth is notably better. It cost me $40. I don't do a lot that uses 3D, but I do enough to justify the investment.

Unfortunately, this applies to a lot of things in the Unix and Linux world. I love messing around with all of it... but I'm screwed up! Although, I have to admit that after a long day of playing around with various systems to keep them all working properly and staying safe and up to date... I find it horribly refreshing to come home and use something like the Kindle Fire tablet that is basically idiot proof.

I've been a computer guy for 30 years, starting on mainframes and moving across and down. I've spent a lot of time popping the hood and fiddling with the insides.

But there's a limit to how much of that I want to do. I use Ubuntu these days because it does the best job I've seen in a Linux distro of figuring out what hardware it's being installed on, setting itself up, and Just Working that I've seen in a distro. I want to devote my time to using the system, not to fiddling to make it usable.

Agreed. Our culture has a strange fascination with screens being as wide as a theater screen, more or less. It is very inefficient for working with most of the things that we work with on computers. And now, with desktops and laptops becoming quite a bit more utilitarian in nature while we all offload a lot of our entertainment to set top boxes (Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku), Game consoles, and mobile devices like tablets and phones... it is feeling even more inefficient than it did.

I don't mind the widescreen, per se. I do the odd DTP project, and a wish of mine for a while has been a monitor large enough to show two 8.5x11 pages in portrait orientation side by side in the DTP program at full size. The 23" monitor I use now just about does it.

But I can't imagine trying to read text in a full screen app where the text stretched all the way across. It's just too hard for the eye to keep track of what line it's on.

Strangely, this widescreen phenomenon is a bit of a blip. For the longest time screens were basically 4x3, or near that aspect ratio. Then we got all multimedia obsessed and went 16x9. But that has only existed for a small fraction of the time our previous aspect ratios did.

Anyway.

The change in aspect ratio mirrors a change in the content displayed. As hardware got faster, monitors got bigger and higher resolution, and broadband became pervasive, content increasingly shifted to video.

That's another annoyance here, as more and more software has started to use video to show how to use it. People, I can read far faster than I can watch. Give me a bleeping manual!
______
Dennis