[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Anthem

I agree. On Linux, I tend to desire hardware compatibility.

As do I, but I'm not fanatic about it. Basic HW support on the mobo/CPU end seems largely there. The problem children are things like graphics cards.

It could be worse than it is. At a former employer years ago, my boss handed me his laptop running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and wanted me to see if I could make it faster. I applied every trick I knew, but there were basic limits I couldn't transcend. One problem child was video: the laptop used a video chip intended for laptop use that had the advantage of low cost and the disadvantage of mediocre performance. I investigated putting Linux on the machine, but the video ruled it out. The vendor insisted developers sign an NDA before they would even release the basic info that would allow someone to write a driver. Don't even think about releasing source for it...

My boss said he would just get the company to get him a new laptop when I told him there wasn't a lot I could do.

The 3D performance is perfectly fine for most desktop oriented tasks. And the multimedia performance is pretty nice for such an affordable solution.

I mostly agree, which is why I wasn't in a flaming hurry to upgrade, and "low cost" was the biggest factor.

Honestly, Linux is possibly the worst choice for gaming, 3D modeling, and et cetera when compared with pretty much anything else in the consumer space, so I don't fret over 3D performance. (I can't argue over the industry space, because I tend to deal with only the consumer side of things).

I'm not a gamer of the sort that pushes the hardware envelope. I tend to play ancient character mode games like Nethack, Larn, and Empire. Nor do I do a lot of 3D modelling, and I concur that Linux isn't what you use if you do that sort of thing, (Though there are some decent Linux packages now.)

But then, Linux isn't a graphics platform in general. If you're in the graphic arts, for example, in an agency or design shop, you run Photoshop on a Mac. Yes, Linux has the Gimp, but it's not Photoshop. Nothing is. Likewise, for DTP you run Adobe InDesign because it's the industry standard. You don't run Scribus.

That's cool! I have had the worst luck with AMD (who absorbed ATI forever ago) graphics cards and integrated solutions in Linux. In 12.04 there was no support for Power Management in the Open Source driver, so I was forced to use the incredibly horrible binary (fglrx) driver that had barely adequate 3D performance and indescribably poor 2D performance. A version or two later and the open source driver added rudimentary support for power management on the chipset that I had, so that was awesome. Performance was still bad, but at least it worked a bit better and the fans in my system didn't run full tilt nonstop (turns out the implementation of proper power management is REALLY important). And then they changed the supported hardware stack in the most recent versions which completely removed support from my chipset which is from 2010. 2010! And the binary driver also removed support for it. Lord, what an annoyance. So I had to revert that specific laptop back to Windows 7, which at least has stagnant, but modern drivers available for that chipset.

The card is working fine here under Win7 with the ATI Catalyst driver. It works under Linux, but I haven't done anything there that would really stress it. And since I'm dual booting, I'm not going lowest common denominator and limiting myself to only what Linux will support.

Better video was the last piece of the puzzle. The big win on the box was putting in a Crucial MX-100 SSD and running Windows and Linux from it. It's "OMG fast!" (I have to tweak Linux a bit to best use the SSD, but I'll get to that in a bit. Ubuntu installed to an Ext4 FS, which is what I would have chosen anyway, and it's a matter of making sure TRIM support is configured, and moving swap off the SSD.)

That's awesome. I only got into the business 11 years ago after I got my BA in IT. So you have definitely seen quite a bit more stuff than I have. Even in the time that I have been working with this stuff it has changed SO MUCH. 30 years is practically 1,000 years in the computer world.

It was accidental. Prior to falling into the deep end of the computer pool and learning to swim, I was variously a structural and ornamental metalworker, museum exhibit builder/maintainer, alternative energy worker, and graphic designer/print production guy among other things.

I moved to NYC from Philadelphia to pursue opportunities in the design field. After several less than optimum jobs, I decided to temp for a while while I looked for a better design gig, and found myself at a bank helping a financial guy clean up a backlog. He decided I had a few brain cells to rub together and started handing me stuff he preferred not to do, which mostly involved dealing with the bank's mainframe, and I became a junior financial guy, resident expert in the financial modelling software they used, and end user support for my area of the bank. The bank ran one of everything ever made, and I defined my job as "If it's a computer, I get to play with it", so I logged time on DEC minicomputers and IBM PCs when the original IBM PC was first appearing on desktops as an engine to run Lotus 1,2,3.

Next stop was a Unix systems house selling AT&T gear when AT&T was still in the business, and I learned Unix before Linux was a gleam in Linus Torvald's eye. Later jobs found me dealing with Windows on server and desktop, networking, and telecom.

I just tell people I'm still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.

This is me exactly. I settled on Ubuntu when Warty came out, and nothing has really tempted me. Ubuntu is the closest thing we have in the Linux world to a distribution that just installs, works, and is pleasurable to use.

I'm a neutral in the OS wars. I've been around long enough and worked on enough different gear to have a feel for the myriad ways problems can be addressed, and the question is which solution is best for the problem. It may well not be Linux. I more or less agree with a comment Richard Stallman made to the effect that all OSes sucked, but Unix sucked less, and was therefore the model Gnu was supporting.

But yes, things have changed dramatically. My Palm OS PDA has a faster processor, more RAM, and more storage than my original Windows desktop machine. Hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper.

I always get in trouble when I tell someone to RTFM!

I've spent a fair bit of time setting up systems so the users didn't have to RTFM. "No, no. Their userids are set up so that when they log in they are placed directly in the program they will use, and when they exist the program, they are logged off the system. They don't need to know they are on a Solaris system or how to deal with it..." "Good!"
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Dennis