Linux distro testing issues

[bvanevery]

I dunno, I don't know what planet Nouveau was ever seriously competitive with the NVIDIA driver. I haven't been reading carefully, but I hadn't found evidence of it "in the wild," and people can set up benchmarks and Phoronix article titles to give hope where there shouldn't be any. Sounds like the real situation is, NVIDIA has been slacking for awhile. Nouveau fumbled along for years, and started getting to first base. Not really impressive, just "well, it's progress." Then Valve decides they want in on an emerging Linux gaming market, and they want an escape hatch from Windows Metro. They apply commercial resources and pressure on NVIDIA, who gets on the stick and does some real driver work for a change. Huge gains are made because they weren't trying very hard before. Nouveau is back to having a long, grim road to try to reverse engineer. All a result of commercial, proprietary development driven by money. Valve decided there's money, Valve told NVIDIA there's money, NVIDIA complied.

Meanwhile, Canonical ditches Wayland in favor of Mir. They're chasing money. I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Wayland and Nouveau drivers, but it doesn't sound like a good circumstance for open source reverse engineering efforts.

[ppClarity]

Open source 3D driver vs. Proprietary

Top-end cards have so much power that AMD added six monitor support because they didn't know what to do with the extra cycles. When's the last time you had to buy an audio card for performance reasons? I think the last discrete card I bought was 15-20 years ago and only because it was a cheap way to get a firewire port

Eventually it's not going to matter. Performance will be "good enough" regardless of driver. We aren't there yet, but maybe in 5-10 years unless consumers start demanding ray-traced environments.

Meanwhile, Canonical ditches Wayland in favor of Mir. They're chasing money. I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Wayland and Nouveau drivers, but it doesn't sound like a good circumstance for open source reverse engineering efforts.

Mir. Feh. If it wasn't already Ubuntu is now dead distro walkin' The laughable thing was their blog post justifying doing their own thing was debunked in hours.

[bvanevery]

Mir. Feh. If it wasn't already Ubuntu is now dead distro walkin' The laughable thing was their blog post justifying doing their own thing was debunked in hours.

Even Presidential debates don't determine elections. Counting Canonical out, without considering the marketing and business parts of the OS equation, is misguided. Ubuntu has got the marketshare, that's the reality on the ground right now. DistroWatch is meaningless, it only measures people who hang out on DistroWatch.

More interesting to consider, is why they think they have the in-house expertise to build something like Mir. My prediction is: they try, they fail, they go back to cooperating with everyone, it hurts their business, but they survive as a company.

[CABAListic]

I hope they don't fail. It's really, really crucial that X.org finally gets a working replacement, and sooner rather than later. Wayland is taking too long, if Ubuntu can do it faster, it will benefit the Linux community in the long run.

[ppClarity]

tl;dr: Check out Valve's distro

In the 8.04 timeframe, I happily recommended Ubuntu as "Debian without the politics". Stable, clean and "just worked". I've migrated to 10 (clean install) and dabbled with 12 but both have gone in directions that have required some serious surgery that have left me cold. The latest Ubuntu's are very finicky about the hardware they get loaded on. I just cannot inflict that kind of pain on somebody looking to get into Linux.

Linux isn't mainstream, so it absolutely depends on recommendations. If the experts no longer see Ubuntu as a good starter choice, well then, Cannonical's slipping into irrelevance. Maybe they'll wake up and regain sanity... but it seems to me that Shuttleworth is cut from the same cloth as Jobs and Balmer.

Valve's offering is very interesting to me. Their focus is to provide an excellent gaming environment. I expect something clean and built to get out of the way. *crossing my fingers*

[ppClarity]

I hope they don't fail. It's really, really crucial that X.org finally gets a working replacement, and sooner rather than later. Wayland is taking too long, if Ubuntu can do it faster, it will benefit the Linux community in the long run.

Oh I dunno, they certainly seem to have lit a fire under the Wayland team's collective rears. If nothing else, I'd be willing to give them credit for that.

[bvanevery]

Why is it crucial that X.org get a replacement? I can understand various people wanting it, but in what way is it crucial?

ppClarity, Ubuntu 12.04 ran mostly ok on 2 old Dell laptops. I did have major issues with power management. The "solution" is to never put my laptop in hibernation mode. This is a Linux kernel issue not just an Ubuntu issue. Within the realm of Linux, I would say Ubuntu "just worked." I'm now as much of an expert at getting around on Linux as anyone else, so that's my word of mouth on the subject. Additionally, I strongly prefer Lubuntu because it runs faster on my old HW.

I don't know what you mean by "serious surgery," unless you're trying to get Ubuntu 12.0X to run on seriously ancient HW (mine's 6 and 8 years old), or you have special server or specific app needs or something. Your description doesn't square with my experience.

[jacmoe]

I sincerely hope that Canonical fails bitterly!
It is their fault that the Gnome community is in shambles, and I really can't recommend 'untu for anyone - especially newbies.

I think it's begun to be sort of like Windows: people know what it is. It's usually on the machines they're buying.
Ubuntu is getting there too.

It's not really the best option out there, in terms of ease of use and stability.

[holocronweaver]

Not to spread the flames or anything, but...people like Unity because it is purty. I must admit that it doesn't hurt, even for 'professional' users like myself.

[bvanevery]

I don't like Unity because it's slow on my old GeForce 8600M GT hardware. Lubuntu 12.04 worked fine but looked ugly. I solved that problem by going up the desktop background learning curve. Was sporting a few Salvador Dali paintings for awhile. When I upgraded to Lubuntu 12.10 they had spruced up the default desktop enough to be tolerable, so I haven't done any modifications.

I don't know what battery life is like on Unity, but that's a very important consideration for me, as I'm often running off a deep cycle battery in my car. Lubuntu gets 4+ hours whereas Vista gets 3+ hours, both on Power Saver settings.

[holocronweaver]

A year ago I did a cross-desktop comparison of battery life usage on my Asus netbook. I compared XFCE, KDE (kubuntu-low-fat-settings), Unity, Gnome 3 (via Fedora), and Cinnamon (Linux Mint). [I wish I had included MATE and LXDE so I could have convened the unholy mass. Ah well, the Forgotten Ones will sleep another saturnine eclipse...] To my surprise, I found KDE to have the best battery life overall and performance was snappy. Unity was second by a margin of 5%. Gnome 3 and Cinnamon had similar battery life, which was still pretty good with ~10% below KDE. Most astonishing of all, XFCE did very poorly both in terms of performance and battery life.

As a result of the test I am running Unity on everything, even my netbook, and my battery life is around 7 hours. I just couldn't stomach the KDE UI. I tried though. I tried.

As a reference, I installed MacOSx86 and Windows 7. MacOS did worse than XFCE, but to be fair it was nowhere near optimized for its environment. I have to suck it up and admit that Windows 7 performed better than all desktops except KDE which had a 3% lead. So, in summary, everything was upside down crazy land. Though, again, that may be the magic of the gathering creating a rip in the fabric of logic. Another equally plausible explanation is that the penguin god Xutxunil was punishing me for not testing many distros besides Ubuntu flavors, Fedora and Mint.

[bvanevery]

You should try LXDE ala Lubuntu. I did a similar "distro walk" to observe performance. Xfce wasn't anything to write home about. It seems to have lost focus on what it used to be, a lean mean snappy performance distro. That's what LXDE is now. KDE, Unity, Gnome, and Mint weren't terribly performant on my HW. I doubt I'll revisit the issue until I do a HW upgrade.

[holocronweaver]

KDE, Unity, Gnome, and Mint weren't terribly performant on my HW.

Did you try the lean settings package for KDE? This made a huge difference in my performance.

I agree that Unity is not the quickest, especially without a good graphics card. At 'work' (a.k.a. the place they pay me to have fun) I am using an Intel Q9550, which is more than enough for Unity and yet I have been getting miserable performance and often switch to Fedora for Gnome 3. Recently I replaced the integrated Intel graphics with a mediocre NVIDIA GT 420 and 8 GB DDR3 memory. Now Unity is as smooth as on my home desktop. Interestingly the memory upgrade from 4 GB to 8 GB made a bigger improvement than the video card, though they both helped.

[bvanevery]

Did you try the lean settings package for KDE? This made a huge difference in my performance.

No I didn't. I hadn't heard of that.

At 'work' (a.k.a. the place they pay me to have fun)

Where would that be? To hear such a description is unusual.

[jacmoe]

Try http://razor-qt.org/ - I haven't tried it, because KDE 4.8x is super speedy.
However, if you're on a meek machine, I think Razor-Qt might be what you want?

[bvanevery]

I used to be able to switch between LXDE, Unity, Xfce, KDE, and whatever other desktops I could think of. So, I thought I'd try KDE since I haven't in almost a year. Maybe they've sped stuff up on my old laptop. All that install did was trash my desktop manager configuration. Maybe the NVIDIA driver installed from a .run file has messed things up. Reinstalling lubuntu-desktop didn't initially fix it, but once I did the NVIDIA .run again, things got back to normal.

[bvanevery]

My system survived an upgrade to Lubuntu 13.04. It made some noise about a libc incompatibility with xscreensaver, that could potentially make users unable to login, but it didn't happen to me. Now I have NVIDIA 313.30 drivers as part of the distro, from the "updates" section. That's fresh for now; I won't have to do the NVIDIA .run dance for the time being. Some time down the road, I bet the distro drivers get stale though. Ubuntu seems to be doing a release every 6 months though, so maybe it won't be a big problem. The most important thing is I've now got, in a production driver, all the OpenGL 3.x extensions I'm reasonably likely to get from NVIDIA.