Author Topic: Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux [advice needed for a Linux workstation at home]  (Read 28942 times)

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Offline apis

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #75 on: January 19, 2019, 12:56:19 am »
Ubuntu forces updates on you like Windows?
Nope

Most Linux distros have a so called package manager that lets you install most popular applications with a single command. The package manager on Debian based systems is called "apt" (advanced package tool) and has been around since 1998.

To take an example from before you would type:
Code: [Select]
# apt install mcto install midnight commander. Then you could run
Code: [Select]
# apt updatewhich updates all the installed software on your system, not only the OS.

Of course, you can configure that so it updates automatically if you want, but it's optional and not enabled by default. You could configure it to install all security updates automatically for example. I believe the default Ubuntu behaviour is to check regularly and notify the user (using a GUI) when there are important updates available and ask the user what to do.

But windows update doesn't run on Linux and that might be a dealbreaker for some, which might also be for the best.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 01:23:02 am by apis »
 

Offline bsfeechannel

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #76 on: January 19, 2019, 01:05:14 am »
Yes, it seems the Linux crowd are so entertained with their OS that they have no need for applications.

That's not how Linux users think. They think that if an application doesn't run on Linux it is because it is not worthy to run on their desktops.
 
 

Offline free_electron

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #77 on: January 19, 2019, 01:10:43 am »
If you want a single option, chosen for you by people who are much more knowledgeable (according to them) about what you want and need than you are, then you should choose Mac or MS Windows.

If you want options and can make a choice between flashy cutting-edge and established reliable options, and are willing to decide what's best for you, then choose a Linux distribution. The easy one is Ubuntu, in that you can just go with the default and be OK.

(Note: this is intended only to address choices in the OS configuration, not use cases.)

see, the problem with that is that you only consider the operating system.

It's like having a choice of 500 different cars that all have one thing in common : they use square wheels.(the linux kernel)
when i raise the issue : you can't really drive those the feedback is : but you can change the color and steering wheel and all other features.

People don't use an 'OS'. An operating system is there to manage storage and to load and run applications and give applications access to files and peripherals( printers, screen , mouse, keyboard etc ). Otherwise it should stay out of the way.

I run windows as an OS .
Do i use any other microsoft supplied tools ? No. Apart from the built in file browser of the OS i never run anything. not even notepad or minesweeper.
Do i ever change the UI scheme ? no. Not even the background image.
The computer boots and runs applications that i launch
- Chrome , Acrobat, Altium , Solidworks, and many many other programs. The only microsoft programs i use are separate tools( non-os bundled) : Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access

I don't need/want 25 different UI managers, color schemes and presenters. All i want from the operating system is that it controls my hardware and provided the required I/O channels for applications to run and the programs can get on the network and read/write data. It does everything i expect from an operating system : run applications and provide machine access to them.

Program install always work. There is never an issue that flavor x uses a different package manager that is incompatible with my flavor-du-jour. Many many times i find out in the linux world that program x does not run on distro y because there is no pre-packaged installer. 'but you have the source'. sure here is a stack of bricks and some cement. build your house yourself. no thanks... i have work to do. I don't have time to tinker with the guts of my machine everytime.

It's the same thing with 3D printers. There are 2 groups of people. Those that want to tinker with the machine , and those that want to print something. The latter group is constantly complaining about the deplorable state of the machines. bed leveling , filament clogging , print adhesion , print interruptions, sdcard problems , data starvation.. The latter group does not want to deal with that. They want to PRINT something.

Same with linux : there is a group of people that like to tinker with code and operating system guts. Linux is great for those. IF you want to get work done ... not so much.



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Online Monkeh

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #78 on: January 19, 2019, 01:29:39 am »
If you want a single option, chosen for you by people who are much more knowledgeable (according to them) about what you want and need than you are, then you should choose Mac or MS Windows.

If you want options and can make a choice between flashy cutting-edge and established reliable options, and are willing to decide what's best for you, then choose a Linux distribution. The easy one is Ubuntu, in that you can just go with the default and be OK.

(Note: this is intended only to address choices in the OS configuration, not use cases.)

see, the problem with that is that you only consider the operating system.

It's like having a choice of 500 different cars that all have one thing in common : they use square wheels.(the linux kernel)
when i raise the issue : you can't really drive those the feedback is : but you can change the color and steering wheel and all other features.

People don't use an 'OS'. An operating system is there to manage storage and to load and run applications and give applications access to files and peripherals( printers, screen , mouse, keyboard etc ). Otherwise it should stay out of the way.

I run windows as an OS .
Do i use any other microsoft supplied tools ? No. Apart from the built in file browser of the OS i never run anything. not even notepad or minesweeper.
Do i ever change the UI scheme ? no. Not even the background image.
The computer boots and runs applications that i launch
- Chrome , Acrobat, Altium , Solidworks, and many many other programs. The only microsoft programs i use are separate tools( non-os bundled) : Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access

I don't need/want 25 different UI managers, color schemes and presenters. All i want from the operating system is that it controls my hardware and provided the required I/O channels for applications to run and the programs can get on the network and read/write data. It does everything i expect from an operating system : run applications and provide machine access to them.

Program install always work. There is never an issue that flavor x uses a different package manager that is incompatible with my flavor-du-jour. Many many times i find out in the linux world that program x does not run on distro y because there is no pre-packaged installer. 'but you have the source'. sure here is a stack of bricks and some cement. build your house yourself. no thanks... i have work to do. I don't have time to tinker with the guts of my machine everytime.

It's the same thing with 3D printers. There are 2 groups of people. Those that want to tinker with the machine , and those that want to print something. The latter group is constantly complaining about the deplorable state of the machines. bed leveling , filament clogging , print adhesion , print interruptions, sdcard problems , data starvation.. The latter group does not want to deal with that. They want to PRINT something.

Same with linux : there is a group of people that like to tinker with code and operating system guts. Linux is great for those. IF you want to get work done ... not so much.

And you rant on and on and I spend more time unfucking your beloved Windows than I ever have dealing with Linux.

Give me a call next time the licensing tool for your software causes the machine to hard reset shortly after boot with no error and nothing in the logs, absolutely nothing to indicate where to start looking, and tell me how it 'always works'.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 01:31:22 am by Monkeh »
 

Offline radioactive

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #79 on: January 19, 2019, 01:30:12 am »
Been using Debian at work and home since the 90's.  It has served me well.  In turn, I have open-sourced my projects whenever it is possible.  "Giving back" not only helps others, but it serves to protect your IP. 

I no longer try to convert anyone to use Linux (for more than a decade).  If you see then benefits, then try it out.  You might find it very liberating.  While it may not be for everyone, you shouldn't listen to anyone saying you can't do serious work with it.  That is ludicrous on so many levels.
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #80 on: January 19, 2019, 01:41:44 am »
Why restrict yourself to one version of Linux. Try one; if you don't like it then changing to another is trivial. Flip back and forth with ease, if you prefer.

Put all of the /home on one mount point (1). Have another for everything else(2),  and have a third for an alternate o/s(3).

Install the one you suspect is your favourite on mount point (2) and during installation state mount point (1) is /home.
Install one you are trying out on mount point (3) and during installation again state mount point (1) is /home.

Then at boot time, decide whether which you want. Your directory and data will be accessible and in the "right" place no matter which you boot.

Or, of course, there are live CDs.
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Offline apis

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #81 on: January 19, 2019, 02:06:44 am »
It's the same thing with 3D printers. There are 2 groups of people. Those that want to tinker with the machine , and those that want to print something. The latter group is constantly complaining about the deplorable state of the machines. bed leveling , filament clogging , print adhesion , print interruptions, sdcard problems , data starvation.. The latter group does not want to deal with that. They want to PRINT something.

Same with linux : there is a group of people that like to tinker with code and operating system guts. Linux is great for those. IF you want to get work done ... not so much.
Wow, yeah, Linux users doesn't get any work done, all they do is configure their desktop day out and day in. :palm:

3d printing wasn't invented yesteryear. There have been additive manufacturing methods since the 1980's and there are plenty of commercial 3d printers that need no tinkering to print reliably. But they cost a few million bucks per machine. What a couple of "tinkerers" from the university of Bath managed to do was build an open source and dirt cheap 3d fdm printer that could print most of its own parts. That made the technology available to a lot more people.

Just like Linux, if you can't figure out how to use it then don't. It's not for everyone and that's fine.
 

Online nctnico

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #82 on: January 19, 2019, 02:10:21 am »
If you want a single option, chosen for you by people who are much more knowledgeable (according to them) about what you want and need than you are, then you should choose Mac or MS Windows.

If you want options and can make a choice between flashy cutting-edge and established reliable options, and are willing to decide what's best for you, then choose a Linux distribution. The easy one is Ubuntu, in that you can just go with the default and be OK.

(Note: this is intended only to address choices in the OS configuration, not use cases.)
see, the problem with that is that you only consider the operating system.

It's like having a choice of 500 different cars that all have one thing in common : they use square wheels.(the linux kernel)
when i raise the issue : you can't really drive those the feedback is : but you can change the color and steering wheel and all other features.
Yeah we already know you can't use Linux because you don't want to. Just stop the nonsense :horse:
If Linux really was that bad then half of the engineers wouldn't be using it. One of the reasons I switched to Linux is because I got sick & tired of dealing with Windows issues which are such an enormous time sink at the worst moment. And Windows is very slow too due to the poor memory management and poor network stack. The same project takes 20 to 30 times longer to compile on Windows compared to Linux.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 02:15:53 am by nctnico »
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Offline Halcyon

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #83 on: January 19, 2019, 02:31:19 am »
It's the same thing with 3D printers. There are 2 groups of people. Those that want to tinker with the machine , and those that want to print something. The latter group is constantly complaining about the deplorable state of the machines. bed leveling , filament clogging , print adhesion , print interruptions, sdcard problems , data starvation.. The latter group does not want to deal with that. They want to PRINT something.

Same with linux : there is a group of people that like to tinker with code and operating system guts. Linux is great for those. IF you want to get work done ... not so much.

Not the same as Linux at all. It seems like you haven't given Linux a serious chance lately.

Sure, back in the day, you basically needed to be a programmer to use Linux on a workstation. Those days are long gone and many distros are designed to be easy to use right out of the box. Ubuntu is a great example of this. So is Mint, CentOS, Fedora Workstation etc...

I understand where you're going with your argument, after all, I'm basically a Windows guy. I've used every version of Windows and I know it inside out. Yet I find Windows 10 hinders my productivity. Even on decent enterprise workstations, Windows 10 is flakey. There are glitches throughout and I spend half my time trying to find settings and options which aren't in logical places. Why do I need three different places where I can find printer settings!?

I gave Windows 10 a solid chance for about 6-12 months and for every one thing I liked about it, there were five other things I hated. Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I will use at home, unless Microsoft miraculously do a huge back flip (which is highly unlikely). In my opinion Windows 10 is the single worst operating system I have ever used (and I'm including Apple Mac OS, Windows Vista and Windows Millennium Edition in my consideration too).
 

Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #84 on: January 19, 2019, 03:00:43 am »
Yes, it seems the Linux crowd are so entertained with their OS that they have no need for applications.
That's not how Linux users think. They think that if an application doesn't run on Linux it is because it is not worthy to run on their desktops.
Yeah, I keep a masturbation shrine next to my machine.  Every morning, when I wake up, I rub one off to Linus Torvalds.  With my morning coffee, I recite a prayer to Awk of Seds, and hope I get to proselytize the heavenly light of Linux to the unbelievers.  Then I go and round up some neighborhood kids for breakfast; they taste better than bacon.  Next I have to wipe my floors, because I keep drooling, the mouthbreather that I am; and I just can't get the hang of not defecating randomly everywhere.  :-//

i have work to do.
So, you need a hammer, because the only problem you have is nails.  Use Windows then; problem solved.

If you use a Linux machine, and do not configure it to your needs, then you are essentially using a screwdriver to hammer in nails.  If you want to get shit done, you configure the machine to work for you, or you pay someone else to do it for you, or it will suck.  That is the cost of free/open source software; deal with it.

You'd be surprised how efficient you can be, when you have a well-configured workstation that has the tools you need.
 

Offline particleman

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #85 on: January 19, 2019, 03:42:23 am »
I have used Debian since 2006. I have used Gnome shell for many years now and it seems to do what I need. I tried Arch and KDE for a few years on a laptop it was really nice but life came up and I got too busy to constantly tinker so I went back to Debian. Linux is awesome. Not having to worry abut anti-virus is pretty cool along with no system crashes, awesome up time and installs that dont really creep up in size over the years. My current install is from 20011 and is using under 19GB. Still rocking my AMD 8150. I wont upgrade until something dies beyond repair.
 

Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #86 on: January 19, 2019, 04:10:05 am »
If you use a Linux machine, and do not configure it to your needs, then you are essentially using a screwdriver to hammer in nails.  If you want to get shit done, you configure the machine to work for you, or you pay someone else to do it for you, or it will suck.  That is the cost of free/open source software; deal with it.
Windows also needs to be configured to work the way you want it to work.
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Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #87 on: January 19, 2019, 05:18:18 am »
Windows also needs to be configured to work the way you want it to work.
Can you, in general?

I do admit that the cost in time, effort, and knowledge is high, but with Linux, I can.  It is never about whether something is possible for me, it is always just a question of balance: whether something is worth the effort.  Because I do prefer programming over administration, I tend to over-amortise the development costs (because of the modular approach, and the assumption that if useful and done well, it will be useful for others/later on as well). I do have submitted patches all over, from the C library to the kernel to userspace applications, and can write a new kernel driver, service daemon, or an UI application if needed; that is the high cost part. Paying someone else to do it can cost a lot of money.

When I maintained Windows and Mac machines (granted, almost two decades ago), customization was very limited.  Most useful/efficient solutions I implemented ended up having at least one part that worked around implicit assumptions in the OSes.  Even visual customization was limited.  Nowadays I do my own bootsplashes and for fun (my favourite being Tux, my avatar, rolling its eyes during bootup).  It's the equivalent of other people putting stickers or decals on their machines, I guess.
 

Offline radar_macgyver

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #88 on: January 19, 2019, 05:45:54 am »


24 fps seems rather low. If vsync is on, confirm that the big Acer B326K is not forcing everything to run at 24 fps. Some combinations of video card, display and cable may end up operating at a much reduced refresh rate. If so, I'm not surprised you're getting tearing.

The canonical program I use for testing if acceleration works is glxgears. With vsync turned off and the default window size, I get ~18000 fps on my Fedora 28 box with an NVIDIA GTX950. With vsync on, it's fixed at 60 fps. I haven't noticed any tearing when watching video, although my display is 'only' 1440p.
 

Offline RoGeorgeTopic starter

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #89 on: January 19, 2019, 07:51:09 am »
24 FPS is the movie frame-rate (23.976).  My monitors are all 60Hz.  Vsync also works at 60Hz, I guess.

This needs a framerate conversion from 24.976Hz to 60Hz.  What I noticed is, when only one monitor is active and video is full screen, then the BLIT changes to FLIP.  BLIT means a bitmap image is copied at a certain location in the video screen RAM (asynchronous, I guess), while FLIP means a full image is built in a buffer, and the buffer is flipped to display during a vertical sync, synchronous with the monitor's frame rate.

BLIP or FLIP, a framerate conversion is still required from 24 to 60fps.

When properly implemented, the frame-rate conversion must be done (on the fly), and with frame interpolation.  Without frame interpolation, the image will stutter here and there, because 60Hz is not a multiple of 23.976Hz.

I don't know who's job the frame rate conversion is, the GPU driver, the movie player/decoder, or maybe some other window composer.

« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 08:04:03 am by RoGeorge »
 

Online Siwastaja

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #90 on: January 19, 2019, 08:04:38 am »
As a whole, both Windows and Linux tend to suck horribly in multiple ways, but the ways they suck are surprisingly different. You can take advantage of this.

I have very little issues now; I have found the dualboot system to work best for me. My Linux still doesn't run Altium or Solidworks, but my computer does, because it has both systems. On Windows, I need to run CAD behemoths - this often means flow of 12-hour working days for weeks, just running said CAD tools (+ web browser and a PDF viewer) and not doing much else.

For everything else, I boot in linux, which is my default boot since 2014. Mint was a fairly good choice for someone like me who would have agreed to free_electron's view about the "typical linux enthusiasts" and didn't like the idea of configuring the shit out of basic OS blocks to get it usable. XFCE Mint indeed worked out of box acceptably, unlike, for example, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and Ubuntu installs I had tried over the preceding two decades (just to give them a shot; they never did fly for me; yes I'm lazy, and I didn't really need them enough to warrant the learning curve back then).

The tools I run most on linux are, approximately in this order: web browser (for both work and fun), text editors, gcc/make/binutils/etc. firmware/software development tools, my own custom development tools, spreadsheets, octave, multimedia players for freetime, and a large bunch of small stuff. Some of the software I use is clearly compromised compared to what I could get on Windows (compare Gimp to Photoshop, for example) - this only works when you use Gimp for such ridiculously simple tasks, and at such low duty cycle, that it doesn't even warrant booting into Windows (or acquiring a Photoshop license). So, in the end, I boot into Windows to run Altium only.

If my work consisted of multitasking between many Windows-only applications, of course there would be no point running linux for web surfing only.

Most of what I do can be done on Windows, and I had a similar workflow years back, on Windows XP + Cygwin. But it's clearly better on linux, the difference is large enough to warrant the hassle of occasional rebooting into Windows. This is especially true on a laptop, I really appreciate predictable bootup and shutdown times of about 5 seconds and 3 seconds, respectively, compared to randomly varying 20 seconds to half a freaking hour; this prevents me from doing work, and working on small tasks on the road. When running a 12-hour marathong on Altium, half-an-hour shutdown time on Windows is not such a big issue. I also get longer battery lifetime on Linux when running lightweight tasks, which is a plus. But this comparison is kinda irrelevant; I need to run Windows to run Windows-specific applications, to get the job done, and I don't "idle" the computer on Windows. I do that on linux.

If you look at the number of different software I use, 99% run on Linux. But if you look at the time spent, it's only about 80% on Linux.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2019, 08:19:54 am by Siwastaja »
 

Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #91 on: January 19, 2019, 08:26:44 am »
This needs a framerate conversion from 23.976Hz to 60Hz.
And because 23.976:60.000 = 999:2500, that means that every 999 source frames need to produce 2500 output frames. No matter what you do, you get either jitter (from consecutive source frames being displayed for different durations) or ghosting (from displaying a mix from two consecutive frames), or you do some really fancy video processing that probably generates some odd visual perceptions and must be somewhat tuned for the source material.

I don't know who's job the frame rate conversion is, the GPU driver, the movie player/decoder, or maybe some other window composer.
Depends on the entire pipeline used.  Proprietary graphics drivers tend to restrict the rest of the options a lot.  For myself, the jitter (each frame being visible for 0.033333 to 0.050000 seconds, instead of the proper 0.041708 seconds or so) works, although it does show up in slow pan type shots as unevenness.

I also get longer battery lifetime on Linux when running lightweight tasks, which is a plus.
That can depend highly on hardware. Although the Linux device subsystems do support power saving states and such, they may not have as good settings as they do in Windows, because most laptop manufacturers don't care even a little bit, and the laptop mode defaults are rather generic.  Having less stuff running obviously helps a lot in any case.

That said, when I first built a nice little software-RAID (RAID0 for OS, media, and similarly recoverable data, and RAID1 for more important personal stuff) in late 00's for my own home workstation, I really wondered why that was not the norm.  At the added extra cost of $150 or so, I had a two-terabyte RAID setup that just made everything go faster. (I had two Samsung HD103UJ 1TB drives that were not only cheap, but darned reliable; it was a pity the division was sold to Seagate. I don't touch those with a pole anymore; too many bad experiences.) Of course, I tend to move a lot of data myself; a few gigabytes is typical for a dataset.  Later, I got access to a laptop with a fast Samsung SSD. (About five years ago?) Now that was seriously snappy; hibernates and wakes up in literally a couple of seconds. Bootup from poweroff to completely loaded steady state does take almost half a minute... If you use a desktop computer, and you do anything that involves large amounts of data, use a good SSD for your OS, user profiles, and your swap (for hibernation!); and a nice little software RAID array for media storage.  No matter what the OS.
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #92 on: January 19, 2019, 09:31:06 am »
Wow, yeah, Linux users doesn't get any work done, all they do is configure their desktop day out and day in. :palm:

I haven't touched mine in at least 4 years.
If I don't like my desktop (think flattie GUIs where there are too few clues as to what can be clicked and what the state is), I can change it.

Windows users don't get any work done: their machines are too busy running ineffective anti-virus software, and the users are too busy rebuilding their machines that have been borked by the latest forced MS Windows "update".
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline soldar

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #93 on: January 19, 2019, 10:34:47 am »
Web clients' OS share:
Code: [Select]
Android 41%
Windows 36%
Apple 19%
Linux 0.78%
Linux might be great for nerds and engineers but the public at large do not show much preference for it and I do not think it will gain significant market share as long as the attitude of the Linux community is one of smug superiority. Maybe trying to make Linux more user-friendly would help Linux become more widespread.

A backhoe is a great tool if that is what you need but it makes a very unsatisfactory mode for family transportation. Linux can be great for whatever but the public at large do not consider it user friendly enough, in spite of it being free. Most people would pay money to have something easier to use and which saves them time.
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Online nctnico

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #94 on: January 19, 2019, 11:26:52 am »
Web clients' OS share:
Code: [Select]
Android 41%
Windows 36%
Apple 19%
Linux 0.78%
Linux might be great for nerds and engineers but the public at large do not show much preference for it and I do not think it will gain significant market share as long as the attitude of the Linux community is one of smug superiority. Maybe trying to make Linux more user-friendly would help Linux become more widespread.
These numbers are very skewed. A while ago there was a poll on this forum. It turns out 60% of the people here use Linux regulary. And that also agrees with what I'm seeing at customers. I have several customers where the engineering departmant runs Linux on their computers.

Besides that: Android technically is Linux.
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Online tggzzz

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #95 on: January 19, 2019, 11:54:22 am »
Web clients' OS share:
Code: [Select]
Android 41%
Windows 36%
Apple 19%
Linux 0.78%
Linux might be great for nerds and engineers but the public at large do not show much preference for it and I do not think it will gain significant market share as long as the attitude of the Linux community is one of smug superiority. Maybe trying to make Linux more user-friendly would help Linux become more widespread.
These numbers are very skewed. A while ago there was a poll on this forum. It turns out 60% of the people here use Linux regulary. And that also agrees with what I'm seeing at customers. I have several customers where the engineering departmant runs Linux on their computers.

Besides that: Android technically is Linux.

And "Apple" is technically BSD unix.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #96 on: January 19, 2019, 01:59:08 pm »
When properly implemented, the frame-rate conversion must be done (on the fly), and with frame interpolation.  Without frame interpolation, the image will stutter here and there, because 60Hz is not a multiple of 23.976Hz.

I don't know who's job the frame rate conversion is, the GPU driver, the movie player/decoder, or maybe some other window composer.
The fractional frame rate rubbish is one that really needs to die. (And interlacing as well, but support for that is still needed for legacy content.) Mpv can speed up 29.97 or 59.94 FPS to an even 30 or 60 exactly synchronized to the display and the amount of change is so small that it's unnoticeable.
https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#miscellaneous
The option you probably want is to set video-sync to display-resample. Then there are a few other options to play with, I suggest using the config I posted earlier as a starting point.
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Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #97 on: January 19, 2019, 02:40:09 pm »
I do not think it will gain significant market share
Why should it?  Linux desktop market share is completely irrelevant to me, and the majority of Linux devs agree.  Only the systemd folks care, and they produce crap anyway.

Most people would pay money to have something easier to use and which saves them time.
They do, and I've done that.  Why don't you?  Oh, you're willing to pay what you pay for the crappy one-size-fits-all thing, but not customized stuff.  No, sorry; I have no intent on becoming your personal servant.

The difficulty in the business model of making a paid distro for former Windows-users is user retention.  If you do it right (and I do understand there are distros that do that), you basically always lose your customers to the more Linux-native distros, sooner or later.  If you try to keep your existing paying users, it'll be a crappy distro, among many crappy distros trying to do the same.

What works, is designing a distro, or at least the workflow (including UI customizations and choosing the applications), for a specific set of tasks.  But unless you have lots of employees doing the same task, it is hard to reach exactly that niche, and even harder to get targeted individuals to pay for your new distro.

The fractional frame rate rubbish is one that really needs to die.
Aw crap, I completely forgot about that, even though I actually used to do that a lot. I can't tell the 29.97 to 30.00 speedup, but the 23.976 to 30 is similar to Youtube 125% playback speed, except frequencies shifted up a note or two.  The 23.976 to 25.00 speedup for my old PAL TV was a very minor shift up in frequency, and the 104.27% speed felt utterly natural.  I kinda liked that.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #98 on: January 19, 2019, 06:01:42 pm »
Web clients' OS share:
Code: [Select]
Android 41%
Windows 36%
Apple 19%
Linux 0.78%

Linux might be great for nerds and engineers but the public at large do not show much preference for it and I do not think it will gain significant market share as long as the attitude of the Linux community is one of smug superiority. Maybe trying to make Linux more user-friendly would help Linux become more widespread.

Android only account for 41% because it is used on a bazillion cell phones and, indeed, it may show up as a high percentage of web clients.  I'm not aware of it being used on a desktop.

In terms of actual 'desktop' usage, the topic of this thread, Linux accounts for less than 2%
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/

I have 3 machines with various incantations of Linux and I sometimes use them at the command line for software development.  I don't use them for the more common email, web and office applications.  In general, I don't find Linux applications anywhere near as refined as Windows applications and it's the applications that matter, not the OS.

I also use the Bash shell under Win 10.  This gives me a nice place to do command line kinds of things like building software.

Linux has been around for 27 years or so.  If it was ever going to be more than a bit player in the desktop arena, it would have done so by now.  It does have a commanding lead in the server arena; people like free servers.  I haven't used Windows Server in over 15 years but, back then, it wasn't all that easy to set up.  It has probably improved...

I guess somehow it makes sense to walk away from the most popular desktop OS and migrate to the backwaters but I sure don't see it.  It always sounded like an ego trip to me.  "Look at me!  I use Linux!  I'm smarter than you!".  Ok, sure, I see that...
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Ditching Windows at home [Linux advice needed]
« Reply #99 on: January 19, 2019, 06:13:00 pm »

The difficulty in the business model of making a paid distro for former Windows-users is user retention.  If you do it right (and I do understand there are distros that do that), you basically always lose your customers to the more Linux-native distros, sooner or later.  If you try to keep your existing paying users, it'll be a crappy distro, among many crappy distros trying to do the same.

For many years, Redhat Enterprise Linux was the platform of choice for developers targeting Linux.  It is a for-pay distro but it provides a stable target for developers.  The problem with Linux distros is the number of branches.  It makes the developer's job a lot harder.  For the most part, they simply ignore Linux and target Windows and OS-X - that gives them coverage for 90% of desktops, who cares about the 2% share of Linux?

Nobody wants to pay for Linux or Linux applications.  It's "free" software, after all.  The flip side is also true:  Why would a professional developer want to work for free?

 


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