January 23, 2012
"Kagamin" <spam@here.lot> wrote in message news:wqjqzbckwmahpotnfeom@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
> On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 05:30:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> can they? Talk about digging one's own grave. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Vista and Win7 (and Win8) have not only caused people to stick with XP, but also caused a lot of Win->Lin converts - I'm getting closer and closer to that myself.
>
> Well, bought new notebook recently and decided there's no difference between migrating to win7 and linux, tried ubuntu 11 and linux mint 12, got too bad user experience with them. Linux causes high CPU load in idle mode - critical for notebooks - and that's in comparison with win7 loaded with OEM crapware.

Those are "newbie" Linuxes that, by default, use GUIs[1] which are known to be insanely bloated. Try something more like XFCE or LXDE. (Of course, you'd likely have far worse first-time user experience with anything other than Ubuntu or Mint :/ )

But yea, I'll grant the ones you tried shouldn't be as bloated as they are, and you shouldn't have to resort to more minimalistic UIs. I don't know what it is with Linux: Ten years ago, we had XP/2k, GNOME2 and KDE3. There was all this blah, blah, blah about Linux being soooo much more efficient, runs on a damn 386 or whatever, unlike "M$ bloatware". And yet, on the same hardware (rather sensibly-spec'ed, too) XP/2k ran smooth as silk, and GNOME2/KDE3 were absolute dogs. It was absolutely *rediculous* how bad Nautilus was - it felt *just like* when I tried to run Win95 on 4MB RAM. Things in Linux-land aren't nearly as bad now, but MS still seems to have their "efficiency" hat on a little straighter than they do.

> If you want vdpau (dxva for linux), you'll need nvidia driver, but its installation is poorly automated and I had to install it from nvidia site without automatic dependency resolution. Also hit one bug with Empathy IM software. So linux still seems not an option to me.

Yea, stuff that isn't 100%-OSS can be a PITA with Ubuntu :(  But I guess it's pretty bad though if that's a problem in Mint, too.

[1] I don't even know what the fuck to call any of them anymore. "Window manager", "Desktop Environment", "Shell", "Compositor", and if I'm not mistaken there's even some damn hybrids or some such, and some can be used together, some can't, bleh. They're all the same damn things as far as I can tell :/


January 23, 2012
On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Those are "newbie" Linuxes that, by default, use GUIs[1] which are known to be insanely bloated.

Huh? More bloated than Aero?

> Yea, stuff that isn't 100%-OSS can be a PITA with Ubuntu :(  But I guess it's pretty bad though if that's a problem in Mint, too.

Well, I doubt the driver installation procedure is different in Mint. From what I understood from readme, one should somehow disable nouveau driver, change runlevel, reboot in console mode, do proper configuration and... I didn't read further.
January 23, 2012
On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [1] I don't even know what the fuck to call any of them anymore. "Window manager", "Desktop Environment", "Shell", "Compositor", and if I'm not mistaken there's even some damn hybrids or some such, and some can be used together, some can't, bleh.

A window manager handles window bar controls, positions of new windows, and the like. A shell is merely a term for something that allows input to the OS. A compositor takes the pixels pushed by other parts of the stack and applies GL magic to them. A Desktop Environment takes several of the above and packs them together in a single environment to create something (hopefully) cohesive.

>They're all the same damn things as far as I can
> tell :/

That's because you don't know what you're talking about. :P


January 23, 2012
On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:42:16 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Those are "newbie" Linuxes that, by default, use GUIs[1] which are known to be insanely bloated.
>
> Huh? More bloated than Aero?
>
>> Yea, stuff that isn't 100%-OSS can be a PITA with Ubuntu :(  But I guess it's pretty bad though if that's a problem in Mint, too.
>
> Well, I doubt the driver installation procedure is different in Mint. From what I understood from readme, one should somehow disable nouveau driver, change runlevel, reboot in console mode, do proper configuration and... I didn't read further.

Actually, no.

You click a "Additional Drivers" button, that will just pop up as
a notification if you have an AMD or NVidia GPU. Then you click at
the driver you want to install, and click "Activate". And maybe "Ok"
or "Close" after that.That is the way it works both on Ubuntu and on Mint.

It's not easy to miss.

You don't install the driver from NVidia's site - you have the newest
driver prepackaged already.

In general, on Linux you don't install software by searching on the net,
you use the package manager/software center GUI or do "apt-get install program".



That said, it is true that some Linux vendors have gone crazy
trying to "reinvent the GUI". Gnome3 and Unity (Ubuntu) are both tabletized
(Win8 is also going in similar direction) and both much more inefficient than Gnome2 was.

That said, KDE, which used to be bloated, has been optimizing quite singificantly over the last few releases, and seem to plan to continue doing it.
KDE however always comes with some useless "Social desktop" features enabled
by default, which kill the performance (and make people think KDE is still bloated - great PR, KDE!). Anyway, once that is disabled, at least on my notebook Ubuntu/KDE is faster than Win7.

XFCE is even faster, and is getting full-featured - it doesn't have much
visual flair, though, if you want that.

LXDE is extremely lightweight, but doesn't have many features.

Enlightenment started popping up recently, which is (very) fast _and_ looks awesome, but AFAIK written in optimized C and crashy.



From my experience, OpenSUSE is now both stable and friendly to
Windows power users. Ubuntu/Mint are more oriented towards complete newbies
or people who only browse/use office suite.
January 23, 2012
"Kagamin" <spam@here.lot> wrote in message news:frjurfeotljhdadmbkmu@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
> On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Those are "newbie" Linuxes that, by default, use GUIs[1] which are known to be insanely bloated.
>
> Huh? More bloated than Aero?
>

I admit I haven't done any direct comparing on equivalent hardware. But my understanding (from Win7 users who said I should upgrade from XP) is that Win7 is supposedly at least as fast on the same hardware as XP. 'Course if they were just full of shit, which they could have been for all I know, then that would of course make me wrong. ;)

Although, personally, if I were to get Win7, I wouldn't be touching Aero anyway. Yea, it's nicer than Luna, but that ain't saying much.

>> Yea, stuff that isn't 100%-OSS can be a PITA with Ubuntu :(  But I guess it's pretty bad though if that's a problem in Mint, too.
>
> Well, I doubt the driver installation procedure is different in Mint. From what I understood from readme, one should somehow disable nouveau driver, change runlevel, reboot in console mode, do proper configuration and... I didn't read further.

Yea, when I see mention of things like "runlevel", my reaction is just "Screw it, I don't care that much." And I even know what the runlevel is.

Anything that involves messing with a bunch of config files (especially xorg.conf), bash-fu, etc, just to accomplish some basic task leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

And they'll *never* get me to configure or recompile my kernel. Fuck. That. Shit. Ain't goin' near it.

Things are *FAR* better than they were ten years ago, though. And back *then* they were all claiming things had gotten super-easy. The Ubuntu/Mint of 2001 was Mandrake, and even that "beginner's" linux was a bloated half-broken turd with a notably suicidal X11 (granted, X11 still isn't great). The "fantastic new super-easy package managers" made DLL hell look like paradise. Using the major window/desktop managers meant having a file manager that reacted about a minute after you clicked, and using any alternatives like afterstep or blackbox (especially afterstep) meant days worth of screwing around just to set up the most basic shit. As a Windows user, I had time to actually have a damn life (Growing up, I always thought of myself as a nerd - but 2001's Linux made me feel like a normal human). So I ran away screaming back to Windows. Now, having previously vacationed in hell, I'm relatively happy with 2012's Linux ;)


January 23, 2012
"Bernard Helyer" <b.helyer@gmail.com> wrote in message news:evddvsmtlbhryriggpca@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
> On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> [1] I don't even know what the fuck to call any of them anymore. "Window manager", "Desktop Environment", "Shell", "Compositor", and if I'm not mistaken there's even some damn hybrids or some such, and some can be used together, some can't, bleh.
>
> A window manager handles window bar controls, positions of new windows, and the like. A shell is merely a term for something that allows input to the OS. A compositor takes the pixels pushed by other parts of the stack and applies GL magic to them. A Desktop Environment takes several of the above and packs them together in a single environment to create something (hopefully) cohesive.
>
>>They're all the same damn things as far as I can
>> tell :/
>
> That's because you don't know what you're talking about. :P
>

When it comes to that stuff, I really don't!


January 23, 2012
"Kiith-Sa" <42@theanswer.com> wrote in message news:dmyzlmuizdyseypvhxrn@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
>
> That said, it is true that some Linux vendors have gone crazy
> trying to "reinvent the GUI". Gnome3 and Unity (Ubuntu) are both
> tabletized
> (Win8 is also going in similar direction) and both much more inefficient
> than Gnome2 was.
>

Gnome3 and Unity are the main reasons I've been moving from Ubuntu to straight Debian.

> That said, KDE, which used to be bloated, has been optimizing quite
> singificantly over the last few releases, and seem to plan to continue
> doing it.
> KDE however always comes with some useless "Social desktop" features
> enabled
> by default, which kill the performance (and make people think KDE is still
> bloated - great PR, KDE!). Anyway, once that is disabled, at least on my
> notebook Ubuntu/KDE is faster than Win7.
>

My main Linux machine is still Kubuntu 10.04 (yea, just haven't gotten around to upgrading). At the time, the word about KDE4 was that it had pretty much gotten over it's botched early releases. And yet I had some sort of major issue with it (don't remember what) that required upgrading to whatever brand new point release had just come out, umm, 4.5 or 4.6 (and even the upgrade process wasn't entirely straightforward, IIRC).

So there KDE4 was, over it's initial problems, and upgraded to roughy the second or third "Really, it's good now!" release...and it's still the outright buggiest POS window/desktop manager I've ever used in my life. For example, the files on the desktop: Sometimes when I boot up, they're there. Usually, they're not. And when I boot, it'll decide on it's own which way it wants to be without me ever touching any settings whatsoever. And then dolphin's left-side tree-pane has a schizophrenic mind of it's own, too - although that one I have a feeling may actually be by design.

'Course, even *that* was some time ago now, and perhaps it's even better now, but...Even if it's perfect now, the only KDE I'll be willing to try anymore is Trinity.

Although: How do you disable that "social desktop" stuff? This is the first I remember hearing about it, so I'm not sure I have it disabled or not.



January 23, 2012
Disable akonadi: alt+f2, start typing akonadi, akonadi configuration menu will appear, click it, go to akonadi server configuration tab, press stop at the bottom right. Also uncheck Use internal MYsQL server. Notification will show that akonadi has been stopped.

Disable Semantic Desktop:
1)System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Basic Settings, untick Nepomuk and Strigi

2)System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Desktop Query, untick “Index files on removable media” and untick every folder under “Customise index folders…”
3)System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Backup, set “Backup frequency” to Disable

Disable Notifications:
a: System Settings -> Application and System Notifications -> Manage Notifications, untick all the “Show me a message in a popup” under “Desktop Search” and Semantic Desktop”



Note that KDE on Ubuntu has historically been fucked up.
I've had much better experience on OpenSuse.
(not sure why, but a lot of KDE people hate Kubuntu for
giving KDE bad credit)

I'm currently using Kubuntu 11.10 with KDE 4.7 though, and haven't
encountered any bugs - except social desktop, which I disabled
(Kubuntu/KDE4.6 wasn't usable - OpenSuse was)

That said, KDE 4.8 is going to be released in 2 days, and it's mostly
bugfixes and optimizations. So if you try KDE4 again, I recommend waiting
for the next round of distros with 4.8 .

KDE plans for 4.9 is also bugfixes, while 5.0 (don't panic) should be a refactor
without breaking user interface - but they plan to clean up the APIs (as opposed to 4.0 - where they rewrote everything from scratch).


I'm not sure if Trinity has enough devs to do anything but maintain KDE3 comptatibility - MATE seems more promising to me (I liked Gnome 2 even though
I'm converted to KDE now).
January 23, 2012
On 1/23/12 3:14 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Walter Bright"<newshound2@digitalmars.com>  wrote in message
> news:jfj0ao$3q9$1@digitalmars.com...
>>
>> Another way of looking at it is Phobos should provide snap-together
>> building blocks, not trivial combinations of them.
>
> So whenever there's trivia to be done, it should be cluttering up the
> *user's* code instead?

In this case I think it's reasonable to have the user write read(to!string(filename)). It's simple composition.

Andrei
January 23, 2012
On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 12:31:28 UTC, Kiith-Sa wrote:
> You click a "Additional Drivers" button, that will just pop up as
> a notification if you have an AMD or NVidia GPU. Then you click at
> the driver you want to install, and click "Activate". And maybe "Ok"
> or "Close" after that.That is the way it works both on Ubuntu and on Mint.
>
> It's not easy to miss.

Dunno, Driver manager (or something like that) showed me an empty list saying I don't have proprietary drivers installed. Don't know how to find prepackaged drivers. Missed it in both Mint and Ubuntu.

> You don't install the driver from NVidia's site - you have the newest
> driver prepackaged already.
>
> In general, on Linux you don't install software by searching on the net,
> you use the package manager/software center GUI or do "apt-get install program".

Well, the complicated thing is that my notebook is new and it has latest hardware: support for GeForce GT 520MX was added to driver 285, but nvidia-current is 280. I don't know what this "support" means; if vdpau will work with prepackaged driver, that's great.

> That said, it is true that some Linux vendors have gone crazy
> trying to "reinvent the GUI". Gnome3 and Unity (Ubuntu) are both tabletized
> (Win8 is also going in similar direction) and both much more inefficient than Gnome2 was.

Wikipedia mentions that Ubuntu has an issue with high power consumption. I'm not sure whether it's my problem, but they try to address it in Ubuntu 12 using very nifty tricks like putting USB controllers to low power mode and hunting down software with frequent wakeups and filing bugs against them. They don't consider GUI system as a culprit at all.

> That said, KDE, which used to be bloated, has been optimizing quite singificantly over the last few releases, and seem to plan to continue doing it.
> KDE however always comes with some useless "Social desktop" features enabled
> by default, which kill the performance (and make people think KDE is still bloated - great PR, KDE!). Anyway, once that is disabled, at least on my notebook Ubuntu/KDE is faster than Win7.
>
> XFCE is even faster, and is getting full-featured - it doesn't have much
> visual flair, though, if you want that.

I don't have performance issues, I have high CPU load in idle mode. I'm currently on win7 and the cooler seems to be off, in Ubuntu and Mint the cooler worked at high speed and quite warm air was coming from the radiator.

> From my experience, OpenSUSE is now both stable and friendly to
> Windows power users. Ubuntu/Mint are more oriented towards complete newbies
> or people who only browse/use office suite.

The wubi option is quite amasing, I hesitate to go for full-fledged dual-boot installation.