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Phoronix Announces '2017 Linux Laptop Survey' (google.com)
Phoronix is hosting a 2017 Linux Laptop Survey. From their site:
While Linux laptop compatibility is much better than where it was years ago, it's still not too uncommon to run into display/hybrid issues, shorter battery life under Linux than Windows or macOS, touchpad problems, and other occasional compatibility/performance shortcomings. So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties...
The survey will be online until July 6th, after which the results will be publicly available, and will determine the most popular brands, distros, screen sizes, and GPUs, as well as common pain points and popular price points. And one particularly interestng question asks respondents what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux laptop."
The survey will be online until July 6th, after which the results will be publicly available, and will determine the most popular brands, distros, screen sizes, and GPUs, as well as common pain points and popular price points. And one particularly interestng question asks respondents what they'd like to see in a "dream Linux laptop."
The complete absence of anything by Lennart Poettering.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Add "Complete absence of Optimus" to that list, and I'm on board.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Troll. And maybe paid for. No sane person would discard good free software because the person that wrote it.
Bring back the build quality and durability of the older IBM Thinkpad laptops. And the weight - I want a clean kill when I hit someone with it.
We all like to bitch about crappy hardware and software, but If you kept adding all the things that anyone ever hated about linux or hardware to your "no" list you will end up with a transistor... even some people will hate a particular type of transistor. so you will end up with nothing.
Point being, if you knew all the details of what went into making your computer you would find a lot of it pretty fucking awful... Once you take the red pill you have to be more accepting of the prevalence of poor design and buggy hardware and software or get out of computing. Just focus on the good stuff, the bad stuff is inevitable for so many reasons. On a semi-related note, another way of looking at things is like Minix3: failure is inevitable, so make it fail right.
Linux Mint everything works like greased snot with a SSD.
Would it really be that hard to just interview both of them?
Just bought a Lenovo T470s and it's very nice.
Only two issues:
- got the 2560x1440 14" display and it can be a bit of a chore to get the dpi right
- battery life under Linux is about 2/3rd that of running Windows.
If you're going to get this machine, something to note: the i5 version will accommodate 20 gig of ram while the i7 will do 24 gig (8 soldered to the board instead of 4 in addition to the single sodimm)
Runs like a raped ape: i7, 24 gig of ram, 1tb ssd. Virtualization (1 to 4 instances), coding, surfing, and the occasional game (medium to low settings due to Intel graphics) are all fine.
These days, audio on linux just works (including things like auto-switching an audio stream to a bluetooth headset whrn connected).
I haven't had to fix buggy init scripts in years (only to have them overwritten on upgrade), and unit files provide all customisation options I need (e.g. increasing file limits).
If you have real problems, post links to the bug reports so there can be more eyeballs looking at the problem.
My Hp with intel processor & intel video gave me no trouble at all except for the fact Mint 17.4 kde doesn't get the vsync working. Does work on 18.1 but I'm not willing to upgrade just to get rid of the annoying flickering while scrolling.
But the presence of either the other important software I run on Windows or macOS today or some actually compatible and similarly useful equivalents.
The success of Linux on the desktop hasn't really been about Linux itself for a long time.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Without signed firmware, but WITH hardware write-lockable firmware (current SPI flash chips don't actually support this!) and a fully user configurable trustzone/tpm/smartcard core (meaning *NO* pre-configured keys, everything from the ground up configurable/replaceable by the end user.)
And all for under 500-1000 dollars with performance and specs comparable to a system built in the past 10 years.
Would someone please tell these laptop companies that the Apple-type keyboards are SHIT!?!! Please bring back the old Thinkpad keyboards.
None of the radio buttons in the survey does anything when I click on it.
This is probably because I am running a script blocker. Why can they just not use the regular old html radio buttons that just work? Why does everything have to be overloaded with javascript bullshit today?
What about "whatever my company gives me?"
Fine... I'll do it.
I have been using a distro with systemd for years, now. It hasn't failed me - ever. I learned a few new commands, and have grown to accept it. I'm not willing to say I like it - but it is easier for me to deal with.
To be clear, I have a small network and nothing of great importance on it. I am also meticulous about backups. It has never stopped me from booting, it has never prevented me from finding problems, it hasn't even gotten in the way.
Are there improvements that would help? Probably. It should probably spit out more accurate information when shit fails to start. That'd help.
Meh... I really don't mind it. At the same time, I understand why other people aren't that fond of it - and it can be a bitch to work with. I have read the stories.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
When was the last time you actually tried LibreOffice or KDEnlive or similar "equivalents" in OSS? Unless you\'re a "power user" in the commercial version and/or you're starting from scratch, you probably won't notice much difference.
I've been doing some at-home editing and proofreading for a local magazine for the last couple of years, and we've never had a problem interfacing between my Linux system and their Windows gear. I just save as .docx and everything seems to work fine.
I recently uploaded a series of videos on YouTube, and used KDEnlive to edit some of them. I was fairly new to NLE, but I found KDEnlive to be a very robust and well supported platform. The learning curve was no steeper than if I'd been using Maya or FinalCutPro.
It will take a while for this to sink in, world-wide, but the trend toward open source is inexorable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Systemd has not eaten my dog or anything quite so dramatic. And it hasn't caused me any problems, personally.
But I've always felt that systemd was a solution in search of a problem, I don't care for Poettering's attitude (especially as regards the Unix philosophy), and I remain suspicious about how systemd got injected into all the major distros practically overnight.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It is, for me, better than the init scripts. I offer no opinion, in public, about the remainder. ;-)
I also have no idea why it's trying to be more than an init system. I am pretty sure that's what they said was the goal. I'm pretty sure it's just gonna keep adding stuff until it's all you need to have besides the kernel. I may jump ship, at some point. GhostBSD has been nice in a VM.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
As far as I'm concerned, a current model Dell Precision laptop is *my* "dream Linux laptop".. I currently have a Precision M4400 but its getting kind of "long in the tooth".. My *only* gripe is its weight... Its great to see Dell starting to sell Precisions with Ubuntu installed, rather than just the consumer-grade XPS crap...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
For casual personal or in-house business things, I use OSS all the time. I'm a big fan of the idea of community-developed software, and in particular of the kind of sharing culture and collaboration that was much harder when I was younger but is now enabled by the Internet.
For important things in business, we pay for good software and for reliable interoperability, even though that sometimes means a lot of money for something closed source.
The reality is that a lot of commercial business software is still better than the community-driven OSS equivalents. In other cases, OSS equivalents for business software might not exist at all.
However, even if the OSS equivalent exists and is broadly of a similar standard in isolation, it can still be a big risk for a business if collaboration is an issue. The cost of one small import/export glitch converting to the industry standard format can easily waste more time and money than the cost of buying the standard software outright. Worse, it might not waste any time and money, and instead result in data loss or corruption that doesn't get noticed.
Ironically, with the trend towards software-as-a-service and trying to rent us big name business software instead of just selling us a licence, the professional/closed source world is now making its offering much riskier anyway, which means in those cases we might as well experiment with other options including OSS if there are good enough alternatives available.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page here... my point is just that OSS is always going to keep getting better, and the price is going to keep it as a mainstay for newbies learning the ropes. Eventually I think we'll reach the point where OSS becomes the dominant paradigm. Will that be five years from now? Ten years? Who knows? But I think the economic 'forcing functions' are leading in that direction.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Lets see you switch your audio output from your sound card to a bluetooth device without stopping the audio with just ALSA alone. You can't. That's one of the thing pulseaudio does fairly well. Is it perfect no, but its not the complete flaming pile of shit people accuse it of. At least not anymore.
One thing that worked about 10 years ago but doesn't anymore is gapless playback. {...}
I searched a lot only to find that pulse audio with amroK either uses gstreamer or vlc as engine, and neither can do gapless.
This has nothing to do with pulse audio, but with the way modern application are built.
Old school application were in charge of decompression their own audio using their library or nativ codecs. They filled their audio buffer, and sent it to play.
When play list advances from song A to song B, it just change which source the data going into the audio buffer will come from.
In the end, the audio buffer is filled anyway, and the audio from song A and song B are just next to each other in the output buffer and get sent to the output all the same.
Modern application don't handle the decompression themselves. They offload all the tiny details to frame works (like Gstreamer). Song are played by constructing a filter graph that handles the decompression and output of each song.
Each different song is a different such filter graph.
Once song A finishes to play, its graph is tear down, then song B begins to play and a new graph is built (and perhaps different graph depending on the file format demuxers, audio decompressors, etc.)
The tiny gap you hear between 2 songs is this work of the virtual "plug board" being re-cabled for the new song.
The modern app isn't in charge any more of building a continuous seamless audio output buffer. It's only job is giving instruction to the frame work (once song A finishes, move to song B).
On the other hand, because it's not a single buffer but 2 files being player independently, cross fading from A to B is trivial and comes free.
the xine framework was the only exception to this rule (the framework itself was designed specially to allow several different file to be played as continuous uninterrupted stream (because that's how DVD used to work back then - a bunch of separate VOB files). And amarok used to be able to play gapless 10 year ago using libxine. (and a few other neat feat). But more recent versions of amarok have completely dropped the support for libxine.
Blame it on gstream to not being specially optimized for gapless, and for phonon (the high-level API used by most KDE and Qt application) being mostly a "play file A, play file B"-oriented API, instead of "keep the buffer full"-oriented
Perhaps the future shift to PipeWire might change the trend.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I find Writer sometimes buggers up the formatting (especially bullet points & indents) but then again I've had the same problem from different versions of MS Office.
Calc isn't too bad. It doesn't seem to have conditional formatting though. Formulas & charts are no clunkier than with Excel.
I used the Poohypoint equivalent once, it was dross.
(Note: I'm on CentOS which is pretty conservative so I probably don't have the latest versions)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... But it's Linux, you have the choice.
Oh, hang on, you don't any more. That's what pissed most people off, I suspect.
Well, I wouldn't describe myself as "pissed off" over it. But I've some misgivings, sure.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
TrueOS is what they used to call PC-BSD, right? Ah, so it is. It's been awhile--I'll have to check that out (again).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's a single point of failure. Whether it's a bug of some kind or a TLA backdoor it's suddenly become much harder to flank around any problems.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have been using a distro with systemd for years, now. It hasn't failed me - ever.
This is the interesting thing, especially if you are anti-systemd (I am slightly). It's the difference between being against something conceptually but not seeing the bad effects of "the bad bits" in implementation, I guess we overlook the importance of the quality of implementation... A poorly implemented good concept can be way worse than a good quality implementation of a slightly flawed concept.
We've gotten a couple of Dell Precision 5520s here with Ubuntu pre-installed; they seem really good.
Their Thunderbolt dock thing seems a bit flakey in Linux (well, Arch mostly) though. Luckily the Precision 5520 has more than one port.
- chrish
Conceptually, I don't mind it. The implementation is, well, kinda odd. It also tries to be so much more than an init system. Conceptually, I like the idea of an improved init system. I'm not entirely sure when that morphed into the kitchen sink approach or why they don't just give valid messages when processes fail to start?
It's never made me mad, but I really think it could be better - and possibly broken up into smaller parts.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Conceptually, I like the idea of an improved init system. I'm not entirely sure when that morphed into the kitchen sink approach or why they don't just give valid messages when processes fail to start?
It's never made me mad, but I really think it could be better - and possibly broken up into smaller parts.
Yeah I agree, and being more modular and minimal for the actual init system part should provide superior reliability and less bugs, pretty much anyone would agree, but that suggests the opposite should be unreliable and buggy - In practice though it's not because there are many other variables determining these properties of software. It doesn't negate advantages of being more modular and minimal, just shows that the opposite doesn't have to be as terrible as we probably think it will be.