A Linux Thread [Archive]

SupSuper

12 Jun 2009, 23:15

(look irony i started a linux thread)

Although that was true at one time, actually, most modern computers are pretty compatible with Linux. The only problems nowadays I hear about are WiFi and Webcams, and the former even has workarounds (ndiswrapper).

It's computers from a certain "era" that don't work - my old laptop (probably from the early '00s) has probably had the most hardware problems; it took me a while to get sound working, and the ethernet never worked. However, everything before and after that in my experience is almost perfect.Well that's how it's been with my computer, and it worked fine with my old one, don't seem to have any problem running it on old laptops either. So now it lives happily in a VM.

And apparently Ubuntu now has this thing that lets you install it on a Windows partition without needing to split it or anything. I'm not sure how they do it, but I haven't had much success with it either. :p

Xinos

12 Jun 2009, 23:24

All computers I've had have been notoriously impossible to install Linux on.
But that's how you can tell it's a great OS.

Muzer

12 Jun 2009, 23:45

Wow, you guys must have extraordinarily obscure hardware!

Or you're just not installing Ubuntu (which is by far the best for hardware autodetection).

SupSuper

13 Jun 2009, 02:32

Last time I installed Ubuntu it ripped out my boot sector.

M3ntal

13 Jun 2009, 05:26

Ok SupSuper, you got the Linux guys out of the other thread into here. Now i'll fetch the Mac guys also.

I'd like to point out to the Mac crowd that if Linux only ever ran on a handful of different hardware models, the cheapest of which cost £500, it'd run perfectly on every machine.

Linux (and Windows) has to be able to deal with potentially millions of combinations of different hardware devices, and i think they both handle it well.

In fact, of the three OS families, Mac OS is the only one that won't run on any computer i've ever owned. Hell, i turned a £50 PC into a router, firewall, and web server with Debian. All at once. It ran like a dream. The same PC is currently dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows 98. It cost me £50. 6 years ago.

Now, i'm not a fanboy of any particular OS. I'll run whatever OS on whatever machine to serve the purposes i need. As some of you know, i use computers for a lot of different reasons, moreso than most people. I play games, compose and produce music, develop websites and applications, write documents, surf the web, download stuff, watch TV, and much more. I've yet to come across a situation where a Mac is the best solution.

I'll happily run a Mac with OS X if someone can give me 1 practical reason to do so.

Xinos

13 Jun 2009, 15:51

I've never used Mac OS for more than a minute or so at the time. So I don't know how I like it. But I don't want to take the risk and spend money on a new computer so I can try it.

But really, it shouldn't matter which OS you use. Just whatever you are the most comfortable with. It's like arguing about music genres or your favorite color.

SupSuper

13 Jun 2009, 16:01

I've seen some projects on getting Mac OS to run on regular computers, so either Apple just don't want it to run on regular computers or people are really good at hacking stuff up. Probably both.

Can't say I've spent enough time with them to evaluate though. All my uni computers dual-boot XP/Ubuntu, there's only one room with Macs and they're dreadfully set up. They really don't appeal to me though, it all feels really proprietary and we-do-it-our-way and takes a lot more time getting used to. Bloody Dashboard.

Vader

13 Jun 2009, 16:20

I thought about putting Linux on my PS3 but I see no point whatsoever.

That's the nearest I've come to using Linux. I get what I want from XP just now, so why change?

Muzer

13 Jun 2009, 16:22

Last time I installed Ubuntu it ripped out my boot sector.
Yes. It would have replaced it with GRUB. Your point being?
I thought about putting Linux on my PS3 but I see no point whatsoever.
Good. It runs like crap on the PS3's 256MB RAM. I've tried it. If you were to do it, you would have to go with a distro a bit lighter than Ubuntu. Like Xubuntu.

bonz

13 Jun 2009, 17:00

I've only used the live CDs of Knoppix and Ubuntu to do maintenance work and creating backups before re-installing Windows.

If all my favourite games (and new games) would run natively in Linux without the need of virtual machines or other workaround methods, I would switch any day.

Muzer

13 Jun 2009, 17:01

Does wine count? :p

(I know it's not perfect yet, but by the way it's going, it looks like in the future it will be more compatible than XP, since CodeWeavers are looking at DX10 support).

Vader

13 Jun 2009, 17:06

If you were to do it, you would have to go with a distro a bit lighter than Ubuntu. Like Xubuntu.

I was going to go with Yellow Dog Somethingorother because it's made for PS3 or something. I didn't do much research since I see no point in running Linux on a PS3 regardless of how well it runs. :confused:

SupSuper

13 Jun 2009, 17:16

Yes. It would have replaced it with GRUB. Your point being?No I mean it completely broke it, no GRUB or anything, nothing would boot so I had to get my Windows CD to fix it and Windows still wasn't happy about so I had to reinstall it too.

Don't get me wrong, I use Ubuntu on university all the time (our programming teachers shove it down our throat, the nerds) and it seems fine, it just detests my computer (I've also tried other distributions). So now it lives happily in its own virtual machine where it can't do no harm. :p

MadEwokHerd

14 Jun 2009, 02:49

Does wine count? :p

(I know it's not perfect yet, but by the way it's going, it looks like in the future it will be more compatible than XP, since CodeWeavers are looking at DX10 support).

Given that no current games require DX10, that actually won't make it more compatible at all. (And last I heard Wine's DX10 can't draw anything more involved than a yellow triangle.)

It bugs me that so many applications use OS-specific API's, even on Linux and OS X. The OS really shouldn't matter to applications.

FutureWorm

14 Jun 2009, 03:08

Now, i'm not a fanboy of any particular OS. I'll run whatever OS on whatever machine to serve the purposes i need. As some of you know, i use computers for a lot of different reasons, moreso than most people. I play games, compose and produce music, develop websites and applications, write documents, surf the web, download stuff, watch TV, and much more. I've yet to come across a situation where a Mac is the best solution.

I'll happily run a Mac with OS X if someone can give me 1 practical reason to do so.

as for the hardware, there's a lot of things i like about my macbook pro - the sensitivity of the trackpad is just so much better than on any other laptop i've used, the keyboard feels awesome, ports are logically situated, and so forth. it is just a well-designed computer, and everything about it screams smart design.

on the os side of things, i suppose it's just an issue of personal preference. when it comes to basic tasks, i'm equally comfortable in windows and os x, but it's the little touches that keep the mac my preference. stuff like expose, the font/color panels, a beautiful (and now completely unified) gui, the little bezels for volume/brightness, pressing the space bar to preview pdfs without opening them - it may not seem like much, but over time this stuff starts to grow on you.

my biggest, longest-standing complaint with the OS is that it does not play well with flash. but that's adobe's fault, and they really need to get their nose to the grindstone there.

Muzer

14 Jun 2009, 10:35

M3ntal

14 Jun 2009, 11:38

as for the hardware, there's a lot of things i like about my macbook pro - the sensitivity of the trackpad is just so much better than on any other laptop i've used, the keyboard feels awesome, ports are logically situated, and so forth. it is just a well-designed computer, and everything about it screams smart design.

I have useability issues with laptops in general. I hate using trackpads or trackpoints, the keyboards are generally uncomfortable, and even after all these design devices to make them portable they are still cumbersome to carry around.

I recently bought my first portable computer, and went with a half price ex-demo Samsung Q1 Ultra. It's touchscreen thus a sensible mouse alternative, comes with decent feeling USB keyboard (as well as the blackberry-esque one on the unit itself, which i'm ok with as i used to own a Nokia E61), and fits in my coat pocket. The trackpoint it has is best served as a joypad (there's a button to switch it from mouse to joypad mode) with 4 d-keys on the opposite side ideally placed for handheld gaming (think PSP). It has a SIM card slot under the 8 hour battery, built in WiFi and RJ-45 LAN, SD/MMC slot, plus a couple USB's and a monitor port.

It's as though Samsung made this thing specifically for me. It's one of the most well thought out, well designed devices i've used. The only thing i reckon it's missing is a GPS receiver so i can use it as a sat nav.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/laptops/review/2007/06/27/Samsung-Q1-Ultra-Ultra-Mobile-PC/p1
on the os side of things, i suppose it's just an issue of personal preference. when it comes to basic tasks, i'm equally comfortable in windows and os x, but it's the little touches that keep the mac my preference. stuff like expose, the font/color panels, a beautiful (and now completely unified) gui, the little bezels for volume/brightness, pressing the space bar to preview pdfs without opening them - it may not seem like much, but over time this stuff starts to grow on you.

my biggest, longest-standing complaint with the OS is that it does not play well with flash. but that's adobe's fault, and they really need to get their nose to the grindstone there.
I understand what you are saying about the little touches in the GUI, but i'm not prepared to pay double the price for a laptop or quadruple the price for a desktop, and forego compatibility with most of the software i use, just for the sake of them.

As for Adobe, their vocabulary doesn't contain the words "usability" or "compatibility". The only decent products they ever made were Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, and even they are buggy as hell (at least the Windows versions are).

Paul.Power

14 Jun 2009, 12:40

Don't look at me, I thought Windows ME wasn't that bad an operating system.

MtlAngelus

14 Jun 2009, 13:02

Don't look at me, I thought Windows ME wasn't that bad an operating system.

Shame, dude. Shame.

SupSuper

14 Jun 2009, 15:00

Given that no current games require DX10, that actually won't make it more compatible at all. (And last I heard Wine's DX10 can't draw anything more involved than a yellow triangle.)

It bugs me that so many applications use OS-specific API's, even on Linux and OS X. The OS really shouldn't matter to applications.Yeah it's really aggravating, specially if you're a learning developer, because you might easily grow attached to one API and not work with anything else.
If you know how to do it, making a cross-platform application is trivial.

I think it's a mix of "people not knowing any better" and "OS-specific APIs trying to provide perks so applications will only run on their system in return". (and that's why people actually use DirectX) Even things like NeHe's OpenGL tutorials are full of OS-specific crap which defeats the point of OpenGL and just makes it needlessly more complicated.

my biggest, longest-standing complaint with the OS is that it does not play well with flash. but that's adobe's fault, and they really need to get their nose to the grindstone there.That's funny, I always though Adobe loved Mac, what with the nature of their applications and not giving a **** about Windows (or 64-bit support, from what I read). They're becoming the Microsoft of image software.

Don't look at me, I thought Windows ME wasn't that bad an operating system.Not even the hairs on my body are enough to count how often that crashed.

FutureWorm

14 Jun 2009, 15:03

That's funny, I always though Adobe loved Mac, what with the nature of their applications and not giving a **** about Windows (or 64-bit support, from what I read). They're becoming the Microsoft of image software.

the original versions of adobe software were developed for the mac, but macromedia only ever released half-assed versions of their software that were not properly optimized for mac hardware. after the flash acquisition, adobe didn't bother to kick it up a notch.

also the reason for the very short life cycle between cs3 and cs4 is that cs3 was rushed to market in order to accommodate intel processors on macs - they were unable to run cs2, and adobe needed that market desperately

SupSuper

14 Jun 2009, 15:26

the original versions of adobe software were developed for the mac, but macromedia only ever released half-assed versions of their software that were not properly optimized for mac hardware. after the flash acquisition, adobe didn't bother to kick it up a notch.

also the reason for the very short life cycle between cs3 and cs4 is that cs3 was rushed to market in order to accommodate intel processors on macs - they were unable to run cs2, and adobe needed that market desperatelyWell then they must be porting the Mac versions to Windows now, because Macromedia Flash ran wonderfully on Windows but Adobe Flash runs terribly, as much as I like its features, so the bugs are probably universal now.

Vader

14 Jun 2009, 15:29

It went all object-oriented when Adobe got their hands on it. I blame that (mostly because I epicfail understanding object-oriented programming).

CyberShadow

14 Jun 2009, 22:52

It went all object-oriented when Adobe got their hands on it. I blame that (mostly because I epicfail understanding object-oriented programming).
OOP from/for the system programmer:
A method is just a function that you write in a class or struct which takes a pointer to said class/struct as an implicit parameter which is referenced as "this" (may vary, it's "self" in Delphi) and given by specifying the class/struct instance before the function name, followed by a period (may vary, -> in C++ when class references are used). A class is a struct with a pointer to an array of function pointers called "virtual method table" OSLT, constant and unique for every class type. Every class instance points to to the VMT associated with the type it was created for, so if you cast a class instance to a class higher in the class hierarchy (which just a tree where a node's children are the class's descendants), method calls go through the VMT and will call the descendant's methods. This allows you to abstractize stuff away and not have to write functions for zillions of types when all the types have stuff in common.

I don't blame any of you if you didn't understand everything I said :D

SupSuper

15 Jun 2009, 01:50

OOP is a wonderful wonderful thing, but it so easily leads to overclassing it's annoying.

MadEwokHerd

15 Jun 2009, 05:24

I did say looking at, not have already implemented and it's working brilliantly.

And no, the Linux APIs are very rarely OS-specific. They just don't work on Windows. Through crapness of Windows and its development environment, not through intention of the API designer.

I phrased that poorly. I should not have implied that what you said was incorrect.

While there aren't many API's that are good for applications and Linux-specific, it tends to house a lot of what (because I don't know any better term) I'm going to call Unix Desktop API's.

Basically, in order to make it possible to make more usable desktops on Unixes (including Linux, which technically isn't Unix, but whatever), in the past decade or so developers have thrown a lot of crap into the environment. So in a normal desktop Linux machine we have things like HAL (hardware abstraction layer), EWMH (extended window manager hints), the freedesktop menu standard, the notification area (system tray), DBUS (for inter-process communication), GNOME- and KDE-specific API's, etc.

These API's are great for making desktops, but you won't see them on OS X, Cygwin, or any old Unix system. So if an application relies on, say, the fullscreen hint in EWMH, its fullscreen function won't work there. But if the application were coded for GTK, this stuff would all be handled by GTK and would work just fine wherever (and you wouldn't need cygwin).

Vader

15 Jun 2009, 10:14

I don't blame any of you if you didn't understand everything I said :D

I know all those words but the paragraph makes no sense to me at all.

I think that's why I'm doing to study the hardware side of things. I'll build the robots, you programme them. Deal? OK.