Sorry, Linux doesn't work

[elytron]

CrunchBang Linux is also good for old hardware.

 

[C-Man]

You can't beat Tiny Core for old hardware.

 

[korvus]

My basic take on Linux is It's great, but desktop Linux is becoming a lost cause. Windows and Mac have been household brands since the desktop became common, and Linux has already won in almost every other avenue in the computer industry *except* for the desktop user anyway, so it shouldn't matter for anyone except for coders for KDE/GNOME/[insert yet another window manager here].


I run Linux on all my systems, but certain short-comings such as lack of quality video editor and constantly breaking hardware support make it hard for me at times. I'm a programmer, so I'm for the most part able to get around almost every problem with the power of a terminal, but of course only 1% of people who use computer will know/be willing to learn how to use one.

If a system works for someone, the don't wag your fingers at them telling them to switch to an OS that is better off with existing in the realm of neckbeards/academics/touch devices.

Xubuntu 12.04 32-bit (latest Ubuntu release has broken openchrome drivers)

 

[C-Man]

Xubuntu 12.04 32-bit (latest Ubuntu release has broken openchrome drivers)

I haven't messed with the Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu/Kubuntu/Whateverbuntu in quite a while. Once the Unity desktop came out on Ubuntu, I got the heck away from there. And Ubuntu(and its various flavors) for whatever reason never did properly work with any of my network hardware where other distros had no problem.
One other issue is, there are so many forks and forks of forks, it's watering everything down with a lot of junky distros. I tend to recommend the most plain vanilla independent distros out there. They're the most well-supported, and didn't simply take one group's hard work, tweak it, and call it something else.

Plain old Debian would probably work well for you, or maybe something like Arch Linux. OpenSUSE is another great one.

You're quite right that if a user's OS works well for them and does what they need without unreasonable difficulty, they'd do well to keep it that way, be it Windows, OS-X, Linux, or what have you.

 

[Qyöt27]

I run Linux on all my systems, but certain short-comings such as lack of quality video editor

This has been one of my grievances for years.

They tend to be:

• in the category of beginner-level software on par with Windows Movie Maker or iMovie (this is the bulk of them, actually), or
• advanced but the interface is completely alien to what prosumer-level editors expect (Cinelerra), or
• even mostly intended for some other task entirely and so the editing ability is at a disadvantage (Blender's timeline mode).

The two that remain - OpenShot and kdenlive - are more prosumer-esque than not, but not necessarily as flexible as users might expect (or stable, or require pulling in additional stuff they may not want...*cough* Qt).

The ones that look more promising - Lumiera and VLMC - are still in early development (and have been in said state for several years, although there is active development on them) and not ready yet. I really need to do fresh tests on them again; it's been quite a while.

I'm in the camp fruitlessly wishing that with the viability of Linux as a consumer target (most prominently at the moment due to Steam), that maybe Adobe will eventually be convinced to release a future version of Creative Suite for Linux. Or just Premiere and After Effects, but it'd probably be more likely for the entire suite to show up instead of just those two.





On the plus side, though, most of the essential satellite video tools and media playback solutions are cross-platform with majority development on Linux or are otherwise FOSS, and more importantly, are already well-known (I'm referring here to FFmpeg, x264, Xvid, LAME, Vorbis, Matroska as both a standard and mkvtoolnix as a tool set, the mplayer family*, Aegisub, and so on). So should a worthy NLE coalesce, most of the rest of the toolchain won't be subject to the shock that often comes from switching OSes.

*of which my preference is mpv. Just saying.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

The two that remain - OpenShot and kdenlive - are more prosumer-esque than not, but not necessarily as flexible as users might expect (or stable, or require pulling in additional stuff they may not want...*cough* Qt).

As far as OpenShot is concerned I think they are going all out Qt due to the bugginess of gtk3 and the whole Gnome disaster. I'm beginning to think that Gnome and it components may not have much of a future.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

If a system works for someone, the don't wag your fingers at them telling them to switch to an OS that is better off with existing in the realm of neckbeards/academics/touch devices.

Anyone wondering what a neckbeard is then the following should enlighten you a bit,

and tends to act like this...

 

[C-Man]

They're fun to troll.

 

[korvus]

As far as OpenShot is concerned I think they are going all out Qt due to the bugginess of gtk3 and the whole Gnome disaster. I'm beginning to think that Gnome and it components may not have much of a future.

Yeah, I get what you're saying about gtk3. Dunno, I've tried Gnome 3 my self and it looks to be a good experience for new users, but I again understand the uncertainty of its future.

I just recently switched to using Awesome window manager. It definitely lives up to its name, though certainly not for new users by far.

 

[Qyöt27]

The thing about Qt that I was really getting at was the size of the support libraries - they weigh quite a bit (not as much as the ridiculous size of Doxygen and its dependencies, but still rather irritating if you didn't want to have to pull in a couple hundred megs' worth of stuff just to run a single program). Obviously, if one is already using KDE or Razor-qt then the issue is moot. There may have been a hint of the ideological split in that comment, but I was never too concerned about that myself, as I do have to have the Qt dev libraries installed for some things.

If it weren't for the part that it's restricted to 64-bit, I would go check Lightworks out, since they finally released the public beta for the Linux version yesterday. Even though the Windows version has a 32-bit download available, with my luck it'd require SSE2. The focus some are putting on the lack of certain encoding schemes means little to me, since the workflow isn't critical on that - just edit and export using a freely-usable lossless format (like you should be doing already) and do the distribution encodes in post. That's what you have to do with new formats anyway.



In other news, 13.04 actually is an improvement performance-wise. LXDE can once again idle below 100 MBs of RAM usage for me.

 

[korvus]

The thing about Qt that I was really getting at was the size of the support libraries - they weigh quite a bit (not as much as the ridiculous size of Doxygen and its dependencies, but still rather irritating if you didn't want to have to pull in a couple hundred megs' worth of stuff just to run a single program). Obviously, if one is already using KDE or Razor-qt then the issue is moot. There may have been a hint of the ideological split in that comment, but I was never too concerned about that myself, as I do have to have the Qt dev libraries installed for some things.

I'm poor and have a crappy computer with no hard drive space left (50 GB ), so that's why Qt is out of the question for me to sudo apt-get install.

In other news, 13.04 actually is an improvement performance-wise. LXDE can once again idle below 100 MBs of RAM usage for me.

I'd like to try out 13.04 but the openchrome drivers bit the dust in their quality and don't work on my laptop anymore. I'm trying to help the devs fix the issue but I've just got no time to do that atm.

 

[Qyöt27]

I'm poor and have a crappy computer with no hard drive space left (50 GB ), so that's why Qt is out of the question for me to sudo apt-get install.

My Ubuntu root partition is only 7GB (/home is ~25GB, I think). And as I hinted at earlier, on an eMachines T1110 (albeit upgraded into kind of a Frankenstein setup, but the CPU, RAM, and motherboard are still 12+ years old technology).

As it stands right now,

• It came with 256 MBs of PC-133 SDRAM -> upgraded to 512 (using all 512 also required tracking down a firmware upgrade slated for a *different* eMachines model with the same TriGem Anaheim-III motherboard just because there were no upgrades available through them or other source I could trust for any of this) at the beginning of 2010.
• Added a DVD-ROM drive from an old Compaq, then switched said -ROM drive out for a DVD-RW drive in 2005.
• It's on its third PSU. The first blew out in 2005, the second in 2010.
• Had to add a USB 2.0 card just to use external enclosures, because it only came with support for USB 1.1.
• Swapped the main hard drive out for a 160GB model in late 2006. The old 30GB one now houses the first portion of my music collection. There's an 80GB drive in another enclosure which houses my video editing footage and provides some runoff archive space.
• Added a GeForce 6200 PCI card in late 2009/early 2010 because the onboard graphics (Intel i810E) only supported 24-bit unaligned color, forcing me to either drop down to 16bit to play games (*cough* Touhou and ZSNES *cough*) or causing a crash because it didn't support DirectX9. I can play Portal via Steam fairly comfortably on here now, and get 60fps out of most of those Touhou entries (with the onboard, they'd either crash due to lacking DX9 or I'd get a maximum of ~40fps on ESoD or ~10fps on PCB by the time I got to the end).
• Didn't have native Ethernet capability, so when we got Roadrunner back in 2003 it required installing a discrete Ethernet card.
• Technically not quite as relevant, but I've been using Ubuntu ever since 5.10 came out, with only a three-version or so gap because I didn't realize the problem I started having with my monitor was due to the defaults not properly choosing 60Hz, resulting in it being shifted about an inch offscreen to the right; I only realized that's what it was when I tested 8.10's LiveCD on my grandparents' computer. The gap proved good for letting proper *nix usage paradigms sink in, because I had a much smoother time using it from 8.10 onward.

This has been my main editing platform since 2003, using Premiere. I also did a four-minute 720p60 video in After Effects on here in April-June 2007 (after it rendered, it took an entire weekend to encode into H.264). It takes almost 3 hours for me to compile FFmpeg on here right now (I remember when it only took 40 minutes).

If I have my way, it's going to get more insane. The 6200 is from 2004/2005, and that's still pretty fair for a computer this age. This, on the other hand, is utter madness, and could feasibly make it possible for me to watch Blu-ray on this thing (given a Blu-ray drive or 'other' measures). And that is legacy PCI of the type my computer uses, not PCIe. It's also not that much more expensive than the 6200 was when I bought it.

Furthermore, I'm thinking of swapping the USB 2.0 card out for a SATA card that would - with an L-type to eSATA I-type cable - permit me to offload the Ubuntu partitions onto an external 160GB SATA drive I ripped out of an iMac. Though that'll also mean I'll need to get a SATA/USB adapter for my USB hub so I can continue using the USB 2.0 devices I have.

It's really gotten to the point that if something can be done I'll probably try it. All of this because I can't just buy a whole new computer - necessity means making with due with this, but it's more of a quest to see how far I can push this thing now. It's a workhorse in pretty much every sense, and it's only got a Celeron Coppermine in it, not the original Pentium III make of the Coppermine (if I could pop a PIII-S/512 Tualatin 1.4 GHz in this thing, I would...but if I remember right, that's out of the capabilities of the motherboard without using an adapter that's not guaranteed to actually work).

 

[C-Man]

I should think the video card alone would saturate the PCI bus bandwidth and slow everything else down. No AGP slot, eh?

 

[Qyöt27]

Nope. No AGP.

RE: saturation, I suppose that would depend on exactly how it actually utilizes the bandwidth. I know it's more complicated than this, but the PCI bus can transfer a maximum of 133 MB/s*, while (as in the example), the maximum video bitrate on a Blu-ray disc is ~5 MB/s, but often lower than that. The bandwidth of the IDE or SATA drives it'd be communicating with would also be much closer to the PCI bus speed, so the throughput shouldn't be a concern. Or so I'd think.

*bandwidth allotment of the other cards notwithstanding