Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 21:05 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) by lenov
Parent article: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

In 1998 Linux supported my (limited) hardware. Some 2D VGA card, a SoundBlaster, a TV-card and it fit into the available memory nicely. I could watch TV on full screen and could browse the net over a dialup link.

In 2008 the 3D support didn't work with my video card. Even 2D support was buggy, so I couldn't watch TV in fullscreen mode (with the same TV-card it worked 10 years ago). Then pulseaudio broke the sound support, so I went back to Windows.

At work I still use Linux desktop (the development is done on Linux). A process called gnome-panel eats up 512MB of the available RAM, so the damn thing swaps(!) with 2GB RAM. Recently I put an audio CD into the computer but I wasn't able to play it (the default audio player application simply crashed, xmms wanted some directory(?) name but in the udev-hotplug-enabled world how the hell am I supposed to know which device is the CD-ROM?), so I listened to the CD at home.

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Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 23, 2009 9:43 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

In the udev/hotplug-enabled world, your cdrom should be /dev/cdrom,
always, automatically. If it isn't, something is wrong.

Much better than the mess we had before.

(Regarding the video thing, I'd say we're better off now than we ever
were. You still have to exercise some caution, but these days you can be
sure of good function *now* if you buy Intel, and *soon* if you buy ATI.
The old morass of complex everchanging rules which used to boil down
to 'use whatever the X devs are personally using' has turned into 'don't
buy nvidia' (a good idea on the motherboard front as well, shudder). I'd
call that an improvement.)

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 25, 2009 10:02 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

*Currently* ATIs are not well supported, you don't recommend NVidia, so actually we're back at the "use whatever the X devs are personally using" (which is Intel) stage...

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 26, 2009 9:59 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

And don't forget that the Intel drivers are still slow, buggy , and unstable. Realistically your least bad choice is probably the Nvidia proprietary driver if you want fast, stable, relatively bug-free video.

This situation actually really is worse than it was ten years ago for the hardware I own. As is the audio situation, which seems to have regressed to around 1995. Xorg configuration has the potential to be better now, except that distributions no longer seem to come with a sample that you can edit, and they've been doing away with the configuration tools - you need to configure less, but it's harder to do so.

And let's not forget that Mandrake had supermount by around 2000, which provided exactly the CDROM behaviour everyone wanted but wasn't considered the 'right thing', so we *still* have the worst automounting of any desktop OS.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 26, 2009 9:39 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

A process called gnome-panel eats up 512MB of the available RAM, so the damn thing swaps(!) with 2GB RAM.

It is well known that gnome-panel is a memory hog, but 512MB is of course not normal. It is very likely that you have way too many items on your panel(s), or that you are running a version that has a memory leak. Quite easy to fix, I guess.