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Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Zlodo posted:

lol i was expecting the "you're holding it wrong" and here it is

i did rely on distro packaging as well

"you're holding it wrong" is often the actual answer though

people install ubuntu or gentoo or whatever dogshit and then they're surprised when complex upstream packages don't work as advertised, because some moron hosed with them

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Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Soricidus posted:

that reminds me I never did give the open sourced cde a proper try. maybe it is finally time to return to linux for my daily driver

prepare to be disappointed

the last time i tried the open source cde a lot of the basic apps and utilities worked (the window manager, the file manager, etc) but much of the complex stuff was broken (dtksh, tooltalk-anything, etc)

this is not really the fault of the open source maintainers

the truth is no one had probably built that codebase since 1993

solaris and hpux still ship with 32 bit binaries that are over 20 years old. istr the last security patch on solaris was done with hex editing.

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Corla Plankun posted:

am i just imagining that i had a 1600x1200 crt before lcds came around and hosed up resolutions for 15 years?

i could have sworn that screen resolutions are only just now catching up to what they were in 2003

there were lots of crt screens that could accept that resolution, most (none?) of which actually had the dot pitch to resolve all of those pixels. i think the 17" mitsubishi we had in the mid-90s could do that already, but it was unusable because everything was tiny and blurry. for some reason when i got to college, there was a contingent of people who insisted on running their monitors at *max res* no matter how small they were and basically sat with their noses against the screen trying to read the microscopic text

what was the deal with 1280x1024 being a popular crt resolution? it always seems to be a very odd choice for 4x3 monitors

FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

by vyelkin
I remember having a Sony Trinitron at 1600x1200 back in the early 2000's. Playing Tribes 2 at 120FOV on Slackware was so good. I think I had a Geforce 2 GTS with it as well.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

The_Franz posted:

there were lots of crt screens that could accept that resolution, most (none?) of which actually had the dot pitch to resolve all of those pixels. i think the 17" mitsubishi we had in the mid-90s could do that already, but it was unusable because everything was tiny and blurry. for some reason when i got to college, there was a contingent of people who insisted on running their monitors at *max res* no matter how small they were and basically sat with their noses against the screen trying to read the microscopic text

even if you had the dot pitch, the geometric distortions would get you

i have seen 22" CRTs that could do a somewhat competent 1600x1200, or even higher, but you were hosed on the geometry

a domed screen would get hard to read at huge sizes; a trinitron was sharper, but the geometric distortions were insane on a big monitor

The_Franz posted:

what was the deal with 1280x1024 being a popular crt resolution? it always seems to be a very odd choice for 4x3 monitors

5:4 monitors were popular for niche applications

something about fitting visualizations of two A4 sheets or something

klosterdev
Oct 10, 2006

Na na na na na na na na Batman!
Always stuck with 1024x768 for the 75-85Hz refresh rate

60Hz CRT feels like staring into a florescent bulb

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

klosterdev posted:

Always stuck with 1024x768 for the 75-85Hz refresh rate

60Hz CRT feels like staring into a florescent bulb

60 hz was ok, not great, unless you were under fluorescent lighting, in which case the strobing would drive you completely insane

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Never had that problem here in Europe due to the 50Hz

Athas
Aug 6, 2007

fuck that joker
As a teenager in about 2003, I managed to get my hands on a discarded 21" Triniton CRT monitor. It had those weird BNC cables, but fortunately it also came with a VGA adapter. That thing was the bomb, even though it was big enough that I could barely fit my keyboard on the desk in front of it. Pretty sure I ran it at 1600x1200 or something similar. Now I use a 34" LG at 5120x2160 and it still doesn't feel as big as that old CRT.

The WM was ratpoison, which is still one of the best programs ever written by anyone for any reason.

Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy

Corla Plankun posted:

am i just imagining that i had a 1600x1200 crt before lcds came around and hosed up resolutions for 15 years?

i could have sworn that screen resolutions are only just now catching up to what they were in 2003

no, you're right. current monitors passed CRTs some time back, but it was a shitshow of 720p and 1080p for years, when a deece screen in the early 00s could give you a real good 2048x1536 desktop experience and an amazing, high refresh rate 1600x1200 gaming experience

when my crt started to poo poo the bed back in 2009 i had to pay 900 eurobux to not lose desktop realestate lmao. otoh this lcd has lasted over 10 years now, i don't think any crt i had lasted nearly as long with zero issues (though they were far more repairable than your average lcd)

eschaton
Mar 7, 2007

the knowledge knower. a wisdom imparter. irritatingly self-assertive. odorous.

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

screens weren't that much smaller

the de facto standard size of a unix desktop, starting in the early 1980s, was 1152x900 on a 19" screen. some were even higher resolution, but almost never lower

there was never a time when unix workstations commonly had 640x480 resolution or 14" monitors, so kde and gnome didn't spend a lot of time thinking about that kind of thing

sure there was, if you wanted color, it was just the early 1980s then

1024×768 through 1280×1024 only became the norm for color around the 1986-8 or so

also workstations aren’t where GNOME and KDE came from, they came from Linux weenies creating Windows knockoffs because they figured not looking and acting like Windows was what kept normal users away from Linux

workstations had their own interfaces that eventually consolidated around OSF Motif and CDE which weren’t Stallman-approved so the Linux crowd had to go with something else and for some stupid reason didn’t go with GNUstep

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Boinnnnnnnnnggggggggg *click*

Tankakern
Jul 25, 2007

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

"you're holding it wrong" is often the actual answer though

people install ubuntu or gentoo or whatever dogshit and then they're surprised when complex upstream packages don't work as advertised, because some moron hosed with them

kde works surprisingly well in gentoo though. same day releases, and the kde team is pretty good at what they do. i guess they're kde developers themselves.

Soricidus
Oct 20, 2010
freedom-hating statist shill

Corla Plankun posted:

am i just imagining that i had a 1600x1200 crt before lcds came around and hosed up resolutions for 15 years?

i could have sworn that screen resolutions are only just now catching up to what they were in 2003

1920x1200 lcds were common by like 2005. it was lcd tvs that hosed everything up for a decade by making everything shrink back to 1920x1080

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Soricidus posted:

1920x1200 lcds were common by like 2005. it was lcd tvs that hosed everything up for a decade by making everything shrink back to 1920x1080

those lcds were very expensive and very slow

I should know I bought one

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

eschaton posted:

sure there was, if you wanted color, it was just the early 1980s then

1024×768 through 1280×1024 only became the norm for color around the 1986-8 or so

also workstations aren’t where GNOME and KDE came from, they came from Linux weenies creating Windows knockoffs because they figured not looking and acting like Windows was what kept normal users away from Linux

workstations had their own interfaces that eventually consolidated around OSF Motif and CDE which weren’t Stallman-approved so the Linux crowd had to go with something else and for some stupid reason didn’t go with GNUstep

kde and gnome were both initially clones of cde

red hat used to ship with actual cde in the boxed copy (triteal)

If you were looking for a windows 95 lookalike that was fvwm95 or icewm. that was a thing, but it wasn’t the point of the big complicated software architectures underlying gnome and kde

hell gnome 1.x needed like 32m of ram just for gnome, ignoring the kernel or disk buffers or what have you. it was not gonna compete with windows, or even windows nt.

Soricidus
Oct 20, 2010
freedom-hating statist shill
I also bought one and I’m still using it today and it’s fine. I’m sure I could get a better one now but I’m really not feeling any urgency.

I guess I might have bought it in 2006 rather than 2005, and it was top-end at the time, but still.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
also re: color, you made me look it up

the sun cg1, from 1982, did 1024x1024.

the low resolution color framebuffer doesn’t even have a name, it was some experimental thing at Stanford

there was never a time when low resolution graphics were common on unix workstations, and no need to develop window systems or widgets to suit a non existent market

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Soricidus posted:

I also bought one and I’m still using it today and it’s fine. I’m sure I could get a better one now but I’m really not feeling any urgency.

I guess I might have bought it in 2006 rather than 2005, and it was top-end at the time, but still.

you will probably need a new backlight. mine does but I don’t know how to change it out

my wife still uses it to this day and I think it is dim but she shushes me and tells me to go away. probably afraid I’ll gently caress it up

Breakfast All Day
Oct 21, 2004

Soricidus posted:

1920x1200 lcds were common by like 2005. it was lcd tvs that hosed everything up for a decade by making everything shrink back to 1920x1080

this poo poo's going on again in that 16:10 workstation monitors are drying up and vendors are now pushing 16:9 dogshit as workstation. not to mention ultrawides, or all the subpixel bs so that sub 1080 monitors can be marketed as 4k or whatever despite basically being illegible for text/ui

Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy
ultrawides are okay, it's just two 3.5:3 screens with no bezel between them.

1200 vertical pixels is the absolutely bare minimum that should be allowed in tyool 2019 though, IMO. love to see a 2560x1080 screen lmao

Lysidas
Jul 26, 2002

John Diefenbaker is a madman who thinks he's John Diefenbaker.
Pillbug

8:5

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

hopefully microsoft keeps pushing 3:2. though the impact so far is pretty limited since they manage to gently caress up the hardware in one way or another in most cases.

Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy
i have a 3:2 laptop and it's like night and day from previous 16:9 bullshit, as far as the screen is concerned

otoh, the 3:2 laptops themselves are loving garbage. like, i really want something like a matebook pro, it's perfect in every way, but they had to make it way thin because reasons, and it throttles about 3 seconds into a high load task, making it just barely better than a loving phone

TimWinter
Mar 30, 2015

https://timsthebomb.com
Oracle tries new tactic: will you install Oracle Linux if it promises not to bother you?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-announces-oracle-autonomous-linux/

quote:

Billed as the world's first autonomous operating system, Oracle Autonomous Linux provisions itself, scales itself, tunes itself and patches itself while running.

Perplx
Jun 26, 2004
Lipstick Apathy

Soricidus posted:

1920x1200 lcds were common by like 2005. it was lcd tvs that hosed everything up for a decade by making everything shrink back to 1920x1080

the tipping point was the dell ultrasharp 2405fpw, it was insane at the time, it was the first time i saw 1080p video and the fastest computer in the shop could barely do it

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

Perplx posted:

the tipping point was the dell ultrasharp 2405fpw, it was insane at the time, it was the first time i saw 1080p video and the fastest computer in the shop could barely do it

well, good news, in 2019 the process by which hardware-accelerated video decoding and YUV presentation can be performed is still considered an eldritch secret as far as Linuxers are concerned, so your computer too can struggle greatly to render 1080p video!

simble
May 11, 2004

Perplx posted:

dell ultrasharp 2405fpw

i still use 2 of these at work. still pretty good

hifi
Jul 25, 2012

144hz is a game changer though

simble
May 11, 2004

at home i regret going 4k 32" @ 60hz for sure. still looks good, but in hindsight I definitely prefer the higher refresh rates.

mike12345
Jul 14, 2008

"Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."





hifi posted:

144hz is a game changer though

how. like I get it when it comes to video or games, but what about staring at code/text and editing images? more stable, easier on the eyes?

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

there was never a time when low resolution graphics were common on unix workstations, and no need to develop window systems or widgets to suit a non existent market

As I said, neither KDE or Gnome were ever primarily targeted at Unix workstations (or, granted, PCs from 1988 which is when SVGA was introduced) so that's a bit of a non sequitur. Gnome 1 came out in 1999 by the way, not 1995. 64 megs of ram was pretty standard around then.

feedmegin fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Sep 18, 2019

r u ready to WALK
Sep 29, 2001

scrolling text, moving windows or just mousing around at 120hz or above is just really lovely

It is fascinating how the modern flicker-free displays that buffer an entire image at a time cause more motion blur than the old CRTs that sweep a single glowing dot in front of your eyes. It's caused by our eyes trying to smoothly track the moving objects and ending up smearing the motion between frames unless you pulse the backlight and exploit persistence of vision

https://www.testufo.com/blackframes to see for yourself

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
144 is nice for desktopping with but for video games 60 is perfectly fine

akadajet
Sep 14, 2003

mike12345 posted:

how. like I get it when it comes to video or games, but what about staring at code/text and editing images? more stable, easier on the eyes?

it makes my posts better

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

akadajet posted:

it makes my posts better

Nothing could possibly make your posts better than they already are, akadajet!

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

feedmegin posted:

As I said, neither KDE or Gnome were ever primarily targeted at Unix workstations (or, granted, PCs from 1988 which is when SVGA was introduced) so that's a bit of a non sequitur. Gnome 1 came out in 1999 by the way, not 1995. 64 megs of ram was pretty standard around then.

eschaton is the one who was insisting low res was a thing

the kde project started in 1996, and even back then, the target user had high resolution graphics

640x480 was never a reasonable target

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

TimWinter posted:

Oracle tries new tactic: will you install Oracle Linux if it promises not to bother you?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-announces-oracle-autonomous-linux/

oracle's live patching thing is actually incredibly good and cool. it incrementally patches the kernel in flight. not kexec. the kernel keeps running and user processes keep doing their thing, and the kernel is replaced on the fly.

but no one wants to give oracle money, so it might as well not exist

BobHoward
Feb 13, 2012

The only thing white people deserve is a bullet to their empty skull

The_Franz posted:

what was the deal with 1280x1024 being a popular crt resolution? it always seems to be a very odd choice for 4x3 monitors

macs went with the vastly superior 1152x870 for exactly that reason

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hifi
Jul 25, 2012

mike12345 posted:

how. like I get it when it comes to video or games, but what about staring at code/text and editing images? more stable, easier on the eyes?

i mean, typing happens a lot slower than 60hz. but moving windows around, moving your mouse around, video games (lol), technically movies. smooth scrolling looks like hot rear end at 60hz now. it's like how people complain about the soap opera effect, only it's like sports where the frame rate matters and you're directly manipulating it. getting into the actual psychological part of it, i think it's easier to track where you are moving the mouse cursor on screen when it's updating so fast versus 60 fps. animations become a lot smoother. it's all completely marginal but definitely the most important of the gilding to the computer-user experience.

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