I'm running Fedora 12 with KDE 4.3 and it's rock solid. Add in the fact that the experimental mesa drivers are packaged and work with no fiddling in F12 (I'm an ATI owner) and you have a perfect setup.
Even if Mozilla paid the fee, it would still die. The license can't be distributed downstream so everyone bundling Firefox or shipping it with a distro would have to strip it down and call it Iceweasel. I'm not sure about you but I can't remember the last time I actually went to mozilla.com to download a copy of Firefox.
The 4800 series of cards have excellent acceleration support with the radeon driver these days (the latest source releases). It's not quite fast enough to play Nexuiz at high settings but compositing runs great and the desktop is stable! I honestly can't remember a time when the proprietary driver wasn't locking up or corrupting the screen, so this makes me pretty happy as an AMD owner.
Hopefully it's only a matter of time until the 5000 series is supported -- the proprietary driver just isn't an option if it's going to be crashy and have poor image quality.
Xmonad is ridiculously slick for this kind of situation. Even if you don't like the idea of a tiling wm, it's worth trying out. On my multihead work machine it's a life saver! The fact that it can be controlled via keyboard makes using my netbook a lot more enjoyable as well.
You know there is a native OSX version of UT2004, right? And as for scientific packages, anything that works on Linux should be easy to port/already has been ported to OSX. Not many scientists/researchers use Windows, afterall.
Sony should have But when I see how many people still purchase Sony products, how PS3s are flying off the shelves, it makes it really hard to care.
Not that the ps3 isn't a huge DRM platform (it's still uncracked while the 360 and Wii have been for years) but Sony is a large company. Just because the division that does music (SME) screwed people over doesn't mean that the one doing the PS3 (SCE) will.
xmonad is perfect for multi-head. There are default keybinds to move the active window to one of three screens (alt-E, etc) and if you need more you can just add a few more binds. We use xmonad at work on the dual screen workstations and it's great!
Alt-F2 can be used in Gnome to run applications. It comes with autocomplete, among other things. I can't say how useful it is in day-to-day use but when I come across a system without dmenu and the like installed, I find it's a nice key combo to know.
Your average slashdotter is not going to get a cheapy $550 computer.
A $550 computer may be cheap but with the right parts it's not going to be slow. At work we just installed a $600 quad core system with 4GB of ram and 2TB of disk. Explain to me how this is a "slow" computer?
DirectX separates out keypress events to separate objects representing gamepad devices, but it funnels all keypresses into one virtual keyboard device.
Good thing I'm not using DirectX then! With some fancy Xorg setup I can use more than one keyboard and mouse with MAME and other assorted emulators.
A long time ago I used to play a lot of SNES games under emulation. Since I frequently played with my brother, I mapped T,F,G,H to the dpad and D,S,A,Z,X,C to the buttons. It sounds really cramped but it was the best way to give my brother space to play too.
Eventually, I put together a spliced SNES pad that would run off the parallel port on my PC. To my surprise, I found that I actually preferred my cramped keyboard mapping over using the real controller!
In the end, I think people will prefer what you learned in the first place. I know lots of console gamers that migrated to the PC that still use their gamepads for FPS games.
Microsoft's support for binary backwards compatibility is generally better than Linux support for source backwards compatibility (the source has the advantage that you can fix it after it has been broken, but in practical terms, a Windows binary from 1995 is more likely to work on Vista than an unedited open source program from 1995 is to directly compile on Ubuntu 8.04)
Sorry, I have a few issues with this.
For one, things like Age of Empires 2 (a Microsoft game, no less) are entirely screwed up in Vista. I have quite a collection of classic games that have to be run under Wine since I "upgraded" to Vista.
Besides that, how can you argue that Windows has better binary compatibility if you use compiling it from the source as an example? A better argument would be trying to run an ancient binary on a modern linux system, like an old copy of Nethack. The only problems you'll run into with something like that is getting copies of the libraries it was linked against (old versions of glib or X11 things, etc).
My experience is just the opposite. The only people I know that run 32bit linux have older laptops or ancient desktop PCs -- everybody else uses a 64bit install.
In any case, it really doesn't matter one bit if the program you want to run is 32bit, since it works just fine under 64bit with the right set of libraries (meaning the ones it was linked against).
Can I assume everthing I do (or browse) will be reported back to Google?
If they're really going to release the source code this won't be much of a problem, assuming they don't do something dumb like proxy everything through their own server or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm running Fedora 12 with KDE 4.3 and it's rock solid. Add in the fact that the experimental mesa drivers are packaged and work with no fiddling in F12 (I'm an ATI owner) and you have a perfect setup.
Even if Mozilla paid the fee, it would still die. The license can't be distributed downstream so everyone bundling Firefox or shipping it with a distro would have to strip it down and call it Iceweasel. I'm not sure about you but I can't remember the last time I actually went to mozilla.com to download a copy of Firefox.
The 4800 series of cards have excellent acceleration support with the radeon driver these days (the latest source releases). It's not quite fast enough to play Nexuiz at high settings but compositing runs great and the desktop is stable! I honestly can't remember a time when the proprietary driver wasn't locking up or corrupting the screen, so this makes me pretty happy as an AMD owner.
Hopefully it's only a matter of time until the 5000 series is supported -- the proprietary driver just isn't an option if it's going to be crashy and have poor image quality.
Xmonad is ridiculously slick for this kind of situation. Even if you don't like the idea of a tiling wm, it's worth trying out. On my multihead work machine it's a life saver! The fact that it can be controlled via keyboard makes using my netbook a lot more enjoyable as well.
Hell, I'm watching it on an open source OS without flash
You know there is a native OSX version of UT2004, right? And as for scientific packages, anything that works on Linux should be easy to port/already has been ported to OSX. Not many scientists/researchers use Windows, afterall.
Considering you also get better quality hardware
Really? Last time I heard, Apple used Foxconn parts.
Sony should have But when I see how many people still purchase Sony products, how PS3s are flying off the shelves, it makes it really hard to care.
Not that the ps3 isn't a huge DRM platform (it's still uncracked while the 360 and Wii have been for years) but Sony is a large company. Just because the division that does music (SME) screwed people over doesn't mean that the one doing the PS3 (SCE) will.
Mod parent up -- just because the US cell network is garbage doesn't mean it's impossible to get good service for cheap!
Looks like 8.0 gets whipped on phoronix
xmonad is perfect for multi-head. There are default keybinds to move the active window to one of three screens (alt-E, etc) and if you need more you can just add a few more binds. We use xmonad at work on the dual screen workstations and it's great!
Excellent point. There is no way to compare Linux usage against Windows because the ecosystem is so diverse.
Consider this: Windows runs on x86. Linux runs on these.
Alt-F2 can be used in Gnome to run applications. It comes with autocomplete, among other things. I can't say how useful it is in day-to-day use but when I come across a system without dmenu and the like installed, I find it's a nice key combo to know.
Fixing a design flaw in GDI isn't a new feature, it's a bugfix.
Why is this marked troll? Vista vs Win7 is pretty close to how 2000 and XP can be compared (most changes in the UI, not the core).
Your average slashdotter is not going to get a cheapy $550 computer.
A $550 computer may be cheap but with the right parts it's not going to be slow. At work we just installed a $600 quad core system with 4GB of ram and 2TB of disk. Explain to me how this is a "slow" computer?
DirectX separates out keypress events to separate objects representing gamepad devices, but it funnels all keypresses into one virtual keyboard device.
Good thing I'm not using DirectX then! With some fancy Xorg setup I can use more than one keyboard and mouse with MAME and other assorted emulators.
A long time ago I used to play a lot of SNES games under emulation. Since I frequently played with my brother, I mapped T,F,G,H to the dpad and D,S,A,Z,X,C to the buttons. It sounds really cramped but it was the best way to give my brother space to play too.
Eventually, I put together a spliced SNES pad that would run off the parallel port on my PC. To my surprise, I found that I actually preferred my cramped keyboard mapping over using the real controller!
In the end, I think people will prefer what you learned in the first place. I know lots of console gamers that migrated to the PC that still use their gamepads for FPS games.
if you have a computer less than 3 years old it should be able to run vista.
There's a big difference between just running it and running it well.
Microsoft's support for binary backwards compatibility is generally better than Linux support for source backwards compatibility (the source has the advantage that you can fix it after it has been broken, but in practical terms, a Windows binary from 1995 is more likely to work on Vista than an unedited open source program from 1995 is to directly compile on Ubuntu 8.04)
Sorry, I have a few issues with this.
For one, things like Age of Empires 2 (a Microsoft game, no less) are entirely screwed up in Vista. I have quite a collection of classic games that have to be run under Wine since I "upgraded" to Vista.
Besides that, how can you argue that Windows has better binary compatibility if you use compiling it from the source as an example? A better argument would be trying to run an ancient binary on a modern linux system, like an old copy of Nethack. The only problems you'll run into with something like that is getting copies of the libraries it was linked against (old versions of glib or X11 things, etc).
The script he used is linked at his site, just stick a cow model into blender and render to whatever resolution you would like.
My experience is just the opposite. The only people I know that run 32bit linux have older laptops or ancient desktop PCs -- everybody else uses a 64bit install.
In any case, it really doesn't matter one bit if the program you want to run is 32bit, since it works just fine under 64bit with the right set of libraries (meaning the ones it was linked against).
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.
Can I assume everthing I do (or browse) will be reported back to Google?
If they're really going to release the source code this won't be much of a problem, assuming they don't do something dumb like proxy everything through their own server or something.
Thats too bad for you, vlc plays 1080p h264 content just fine on my cheapo dualcore AMD.