Page 5 of 10 FirstFirst ... 34567 ... LastLast
Results 41 to 50 of 91

Thread: Linux (Ubuntu, etc)

  1. #41
    What fresh hell is this? overpowered's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    San Diego, CA
    Posts
    6,113
    Linux is running almost 2.5% of market share on W3C counter which gets its data from web hits -- desktop users. Linux is big in the server market but

    https://www.w3counter.com/globalstat...r=2016&month=6

    Also notable from that page, Firefox is beating IE/Edge.

  2. #42
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    5,101
    I'm pleased to see that, if only because if reaffirms my choice to run Ubuntu on my home PC. I should say that's MY home PC, and not the choice of my wife or kids, but I like it. It's a simple OS with elements of classic Windows and Mac features that, it seems to me, anyone could start using immediately. I've had no - zero - none - of the bullshit my wife gets on her Windows machine with all the popups threatening immediate doom and whatnot.

    As just a consumer and not a computer pro like some of you guys, I must say I'm surprised that Macs (not iOS) still have such a small market share. I would have thought all the iPod, iPad, and iPhone users would have naturally moved toward Macintoshes for their desktop needs, if only for familiarity and the amateur (that's me!) assumption of greater compatibility.

    I would assume the smaller share of the market earned by Macs is due to the same reason as always: they cost a friggin' fortune, and I say that as someone who is actively shopping for a new desktop PC. Even used/refurbished/God-knows-what iMacs from 2013 have asking prices of over a grand! Just this week I visited my local MicroCenter (www.microcenter.com) store to see an iMac in person and click around on it and launch GarageBand and I was struck my how flimsy the whole thing seemed to be, physically. Macs didn't used to be like that, and a guy at work won't shut up (and I'm glad) about how poorly made Chinese Macs are these days, and how - apparently, I haven't researched this on my own - you can't upgrade them, such as adding RAM or changing sound cards or video cars or hard drives, etc.

    Maybe that's why everyone buys Dells and Windows and suffers with all those damn popups and viruses and "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"

    For the fiftieth, if not one hundredth time, NO, Mr. Paper Clip Assistant Dude.

    But I don't deal with him anymore, or any of that other crap. Let's see...how do those iWhatever people do it:

    This message brought to you by Ubuntu 14.04

    (disclaimer: I surf this site on an iPad as often as I use the Ubuntu machine in the basement )
    Last edited by George; July 2nd, 2016 at 03:55 PM.

  3. #43
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    5,991
    Quote Originally Posted by George View Post
    Macs didn't used to be like that, and a guy at work won't shut up (and I'm glad) about how poorly made Chinese Macs are these days, and how - apparently, I haven't researched this on my own - you can't upgrade them, such as adding RAM or changing sound cards or video cars or hard drives, etc.
    Lol. I always understood that Macs (save for Mac Pros and maybe some of the really REALLY early imacs?) have been impossible to upgrade for years.

  4. #44
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    5,101
    I guess it depends on how you think about "years". I clearly remember lifting the lid of the Mac IIci boxes where I worked in the mid-90s and changing from SIMMs to DIMMs or something along those lines. I think we went from 8 to 16 MB of RAM, or maybe 16 to 32 MB. I don't know the numbers for sure, but I know it was MEGAbytes and not GIGAbytes back then.

    I remember reading Mac World or Mac User or some such magazines on my lunch breaks in the company lunch room and learning about the latest Macs that could hold as much as 256 MB of RAM, which was mind-blowing back then. The company subscribed to the magazine, which broke news about things like the new World Wide Web and DVDs - the latter an acronym so awkward to say that I thought it would never come into the common vernacular in the way CDs had a few years earlier. Another hot topic during those years were the coming Mac Clones, and we had one soon after, although I can't remember the name; only that it had a red, circular logo. And of course, this was back when the Apple logo had rainbow stripes.

    Edited to add: Power Computing! It's all coming back to me now.

    I'm also fairly sure I remember upgrading my first Mac, a Performa 630CD that I bought in 1996, I think, in a similar fashion. 8 MB to 16 MB stands out in my memory, but I suppose I could wrong about the particulars.

    It's funny that 20 years after buying my first Mac, and over 25 years since I first used a Mac, I'm STILL fighting the Mac vs. PC battle in my mind, and now the Ubuntu OS is in the mix too, just to make things even more confusing.

    As with most things in life, a giant sack of cash would make my choices much simpler.
    Last edited by George; July 13th, 2016 at 06:23 PM.

  5. #45
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    5,991
    By "years", I meant "years", not "decades". So I mean at least since the all-in-one aluminium iMacs were introduced, and even the pod with the movable monitor (second-gen model).

    PCs 4 Ly43

  6. #46
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    10,171
    You can upgrade that AIOs. I've done it quite recently. You're not replacing motherboards or anything, but CPU/RAM/drive are all doable.

  7. #47
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    5,101
    If there was an open-source app similar to GarageBand, I wouldn't be wasting time thinking about this. I'd have a new Dell running Ubuntu here already.

    Lately I'm looking at a dollar comparison of these two options:

    1. Brand new 27" Apple iMac

    Or, for approximately the same cost, EVERYTHING listed below

    1. Dell XPS 8900 or similar from the Dell Outlet
    2. Maybe a 24" or 27" monitor, although I have a decent monitor already, and of course keyboards and mice for PC already
    3. A couple better microphones for home recording
    4. A new 88-key MIDI keyboard, medium quality (not entry level, but not a pro stage unit either)
    5. USB audio interface
    6. Medium quality home studio monitors (Mackie makes some really affordable ones that get great reviews)

    AND, probably still within the cost of a new iMac...

    7. Decent used drum kit from craigslist or a local drum shop I know and like, on the small side - say a four-piece kit with hi-hat, crash, and ride cymbals - and my kids and I learn to play the drums together.

    As much as I think I'd enjoy GarageBand from videos I've watched, the latter seems like it might be more fun and better since it would involve the kids instead of just me hiding out in the basement with a guitar plugged into a computer.

    In other Linux/Ubuntu news, I recently visited www.system76.com, the Denver-based company that sells Ubuntu machines, and found this silly video about Tux the penguin's 4th of July adventures. Weird. But that's how things are in Colorado, sometimes.


  8. #48
    What fresh hell is this? overpowered's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    San Diego, CA
    Posts
    6,113
    Just tried Fedora Workstation (regular Gnome3) in a VirtualBox.

    Holy crap. Gnome3 sucks. Apparently it's designed for people who don't do programming. I wanted to make sure I had zlib-devel and gcc-c++ for something I wanted to build and the software installation GUI can't seem to find those installed or find them to install from a repository. I also wanted kernel-devel which is needed to install the VirtualBox guest additions. Same problem. Apparently if you're not looking for a browser or a paint tool, the install GUI doesn't know what the fuck you want.

    I managed to find them with dnf on the command line. Doing updates with dnf command line too.

    The GUI is so useless that I'm back to command line for everything. Welcome to 2000. Lucky I remember how to use yum and dnf is more or less the same as yum.
    Last edited by overpowered; July 25th, 2016 at 11:31 PM.

  9. #49
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    664
    Me dummy tried new lubuntu in '99 industrial machine.

  10. #50
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Posts
    5,101
    I'm back on the Ubuntu bandwagon after mentioning something at work about a few retired desktop machines that are just sitting in the storage room and getting more and more obsolete by the day. "Take one home!" was the reply.

    So I did. My son and I created a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on our Win10 machine, connected an older monitor, keyboard, and mouse from our spare parts pile, and in a surprisingly short time (10 minutes, maybe) were up and running. I'm posting from it now.

    It's an HP Compaq dc5800 Microtower, which seems poorly named because it's a very large box - easily as large as my Dell XPS 8900. I'm wondering it might work as a generic box for a build-your-own PC in the future. It has the old serial ports for keyboard and mouse, but also six USB ports and a DVD drive that I haven't tried yet. It also has three fans, which seems like a lot. No HDMI output. It was originally a Windows Vista machine.

    From the "About This Computer" screen in Ubuntu:

    Memory: 1.9 GiB
    Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33 GHz x 2
    Graphics: Intel Q33
    OS type: 64-bit
    Disk: 76.5 GB

    Clicking around in the OS is fast - faster than I remember the old laptop I first installed Ubuntu on being, but I think the hard drive was dying on that one. Web surfing is fine. YouTube videos work fine.

    To test the graphics beyond YT videos, I downloaded Sauerbraten, an open-source first-person shooter that I've played before. That game reveals this computer's age and/or lack of power. It's sort of choppy - playable for those of us who remember gaming in the '90s, but my son disapproves. I'm sure simple arcade-style games would do fine.

    All in all, it's a perfectly good "extra" computer to have around the house.

    Money spent to get this computer up and running: $0.00.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •