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ToxicFrog posted:What're the current best printer and scanner manufacturers to look at for Linux support? Historically I've used HP (good, but I've never used their scanners), Epson (software was fine, hardware was flaky), and canon (total garbage in every respect). I've got an HP all-in-one with built-in wireless that has been remarkably easy and non-painful to use regardless of platform. I've used both Epson and Canon printers just fine under Linux, too, although I had a fairly high-end Canon. For wireless, I think HP is still a good bet.
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Feb 2, 2014 06:30
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Riso posted:Oh I've looked at Ubuntu. It's so loving half-arsed I don't even know what to say. I abandoned Ubuntu around the 9.04 release - I didn't like where it was heading at that point, and it seems my impression was correct. At this point my preferred distro is openSUSE, and gotta say that 13.1 has impressed the hell out of me. The KDE spin of 13.1 runs like a champ on my Acer netbook, and screams on the other machines I've put it on.
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Apr 26, 2014 04:23
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Riso posted:What I don't like about KDE is the mouse behaviour. Either you have to double click twice on everything OR you have to be single click on everything. About the only place I actually see that behavior show up is in the KDE control panel - the main system panel in openSUSE, YaST, runs with single clicks like in Windows. I personally hate having the file browser in any OS react to single clicks, so always set the default to require double clicks. Just checked on this machine, which is running openSUSE 12.3 because I haven't bothered migrating it to 13.1 yet - it's crazy-fast as it is right now, and it's my main desktop, so I've been putting off doing what is currently an unnecessary upgrade.
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Apr 27, 2014 04:51
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open container posted:I recently installed Mint XFCE 32 on my old crappy netbook (atom n270, 1gb ram) and the performance isn't terrible but leaves a bit to be desired. Will another distro give significantly better performance or is this pretty much as good as it gets? I haven't tried the 32-bit version, but I can say that the KDE spin of openSUSE 13.1 is noticeably faster than the 12.2 XFCE spin was on my AMD C-60 powered netbook. That said I am also using 64-bit, and have 4gb of RAM.
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May 3, 2014 21:23
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For anything with a keyboard and mouse, I'd say that OpenSUSE 13.1 is more "ready for the desktop" than Windows 8 is. The KDE spin certainly is, at least.
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May 12, 2014 08:58
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JHVH-1 posted:When Gnome 2 came out everyone freaked and whined and complained and then got used to it. Its the circle of life. Gnome 3 was enough to make me abandon Gnome, and I haven't looked back since. I understand that having a UI geared to fingerpainting is a thing now (see Windows 8), but I personally neither want nor need it.
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May 19, 2014 01:03
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Hollow Talk posted:I actually quite like the split nature of most of the projects, because it allows for a more finely grained control of which repositories are necessary in case something were to go sour or for distribution upgrades. You can essentially start with a solid core of only two repositories (oss + update) and then layer on whatever you might need for your specific use case, specific updates or extra packages. I agree - I've been running OpenSUSE since 12.2 and it's become my distro of choice. The package management has only gotten slicker with each release, and I've found it generally preferable to Synaptic, which used to be my favorite package manager.
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May 25, 2014 22:55
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Ema Nymton posted:I heard about Yellow Dog in my searches, but it hasn't been updated in a while. I wanted to start with a distro which still has some support. Looks like OpenSUSE has the current release available for PPC: http://download.opensuse.org/ports/ppc/ I haven't run a PPC install in several years, but I ran an 11.x OpenSUSE install on a G4 and it did pretty nicely. At the same time I also roadtested Xubuntu PPC on a similar machine, and it did fine, too. The main thing you'll be missing is going to be Flash support - I'm not sure if Chrome would be a workaround for that or not, although I suspect it wouldn't be. You should be able to burn the ISO to disk, and then option-boot from it, unless that is disabled by having an administrator user set up. To get around that, I'm not sure if zapping the PRAM would remove it - it's been about 5 years since I spent any time working with Macs, so my memory is rusty.
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Jun 5, 2014 21:56
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What graphics card is it? AMD still has awful driver support in general, and proprietary driver support was mangled for cards as recent as HD 4000. I dealt with a similar issue on an HP all-in-one running AMD graphics, and just had to settle for the open source driver for the time being. Looks like this describes a similar situation on Ubuntu" https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/1058040 It is stuff like this that has been a significant reason that, when possible, I have run Nvidia cards in all my builds for many years now.
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Jun 9, 2014 23:46
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That should be new enough that the regular Catalyst drivers should work. I'm not sure exactly how great the Crossfire support is - that is not something I have ever had to deal with. Aside from on-board AMD graphics (my netbook and aforementioned HP all-in-one have newer and older AMD graphics, respectively) the last discrete card I ran that wasn't Nvidia was a Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder about a decade ago. Great card, but terrible drivers and software even then. I'd really hoped that driver and software support would improve when AMD bought ATI, but that never really seemed to happen.
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Jun 10, 2014 00:11
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General_Failure posted:Everything just tells me 5700 series. For what it's worth, the fglrx driver on my netbook has been running beautifully (it's got an HD 6000 series chip) under openSUSE 12.3 and 13.1 (the current release).
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Jun 10, 2014 00:46
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I'm not sure if this is at all applicable, but a couple years ago (on a machine running PCLinuxOS) I found that I had to run the Nvidia control panel as root in order for it to retain settings. I don't know if sudoing into it might give you persistent results or not, but it's akin to what it took for my Nvidia settings to persist on that system.
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Jun 10, 2014 01:43
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Experto Crede posted:I bought an old 486 laptop on the cheap and I'm planning to use DSL and I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience getting DSL/linux in general running on a low spec device? I'll be installing from a CF PCMCIA adaptor and I'm almost certain the BIOS won't support booting from this, but I'm hoping the boot floppy method will work? Sorry - the oldest hardware I've run Linux on is a Pentium II Toshiba laptop. Puppy actually made it surprisingly usable, aside from being stuck with the crappy screen resolution the laptop was built with.
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Jul 2, 2014 01:33
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Longinus00 posted:Only part of the "loading" time of a game is physically reading information from your disk. There's a lot of other processing that goes on afterwards. I've been playing Shadowrun Returns quite a bit, and it is quite evident that the larger and more complex a map, the longer the load times. I haven't tried playing it on Windows yet, but I'm guessing that I would see the same thing happening on that side. My Steam library runs off a normal SATA HD, not an SSD, and the load times are only annoying when I am having to load new areas frequently (the Workshop DLC Darkness Falls has an area where you can end up having to go from a large to a small map and then back to the large map repeatedly). Generally, though, I don't consider the load times to be excessive.
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Jul 12, 2014 21:49
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evol262 posted:This article is aggressively misleading, technically wrong in some places, castigates systemd for problems sysvinit and other init systems share, and lumps the entire systemd project into a single daemon. It is the epitome of FUD. I've been peripherally aware of the whole drama regarding systemd, and was a little leery when I updated my first machine to a release that used it. Same was true for the first time I used GRUB2. In both cases, the most surprising result was that it was entirely seamless and has never caused me a problem. In fairness, I only run Linux desktops, and don't do a whole lot of hardware changes on a regular basis. Still, even with dual and triple boot systems I have yet to encounter an issue.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:50
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Suspicious Dish posted:Wait, you're using GRUB2 without any problems? Who are you? Someone who avoided using it until 2012 or so.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:31
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Thermopyle posted:I don't have an answer for you because I gave up trying to understand how gnome does this a long time ago, but I just wanted to say I always found what Gnome was doing here hilariously un-understandable. Gnome 3 was my cue to abandon Gnome altogether, so it's been years since I dealt with it at all. I switched initially to using XFCE mostly, but at this point I run almost entirely KDE.
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Jul 29, 2014 01:15
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xtal posted:My desktop PC needs to run Linux. It boots into Steam's big picture mode (with exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session steam -bigpicture in xinitrc). PulseAudio starts correctly and presumable D-Bus does too, but there's no audio despite Steam properly recognizing the sound server. The hard part is that I need to debug it from outside of the X session. Where can I start? What distro and DE are you using? Also, is there a reason for using Big Picture mode at startup? I've been running Steam without a hitch for months, and my sound has always been fine. This machine is running openSUSE 12.3 KDE and PulseAudio off the mobo's Intel sound.
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Aug 2, 2014 22:55
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Prince John posted:Apologies in advance for the price. I use a Buffalo router as a wireless bridge to get my desktop on my home network. Sure, it ain't ideal for portable use, but at home it's nice to have the machine think it is just running ethernet. If 5ghz is important, and mobility isn't, then a cheap second router set up as a bridge would be a more cost-effective way of accomplishing getting wireless network access.
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Aug 8, 2014 02:39
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jjttjj posted:Hmm I've been messing around with manually adding an IP address for 2 hours now with no results. Any further tips/tricks to help figure out what's going on? Did you disable the wireless connection before trying to get the ethernet up and running?
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Aug 21, 2014 08:48
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mod sassinator posted:I just want an OS where basic stuff like sound works without any loving around, but 12.04 is getting really long in the tooth and I'm sick of installing PPA's to get more up to date stuff like better compilers, etc. Curious if anyone else has abandoned Ubuntu and where you went, because 14.04 LTS seems like a giant turd so far. Personally, I abandoned Ubuntu around the 9.04 release. I spent a couple years running PCLOS as my preferred distro, then moved to using openSUSE as my desktop OS. All my machines now run openSUSE, and it's been uniformly excellent on each install. The only caveat to that is that I have only run the XFCE and KDE spins, so can't speak to their implementation of other DEs.
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Aug 28, 2014 20:48
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Prince John posted:What's happening with SUSE these days? Has SEL lost the enterprise wars to RHEL and Ubuntu or is it still going strong? For some reason I never really see much mention of it these days. I'm honestly not sure, but my impression is that SUSE has a better hold in Europe while Redhat dominates in the US. I've just been running openSUSE as a desktop OS on a half-dozen or so machines, and it has been a joy on all of them, particularly since the 13.1 release.
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Aug 30, 2014 11:20
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ExcessBLarg! posted:So which other laptop runs Linux flawlessly? Yeah if you get a sufficiently old ThinkPad it will work with most modern desktop distributions. But I definitely had to futz around a lot back in the day to get my T61 working, and had to futz a lot with it again a few months ago when Debian switched to systemd and broke all my poo poo. Perhaps I have just had extremely good luck over the years, but I would find it difficult to think of a laptop that didn't work flawlessly under Linux. The only sticking point that is coming to mind at the moment is 5ghz wireless adapters, but I am used to just running wireless G anyway. Also, I guess I am assuming that you would be running proprietary drivers and such, and not insisting on a completely open source environment. My little Acer AO722 netbook runs vastly better under Linux than it does under Windows, including with more up-to-date graphics drivers and such.
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Sep 12, 2014 00:59
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Wireless has been an on and off again pain. Yeah, I should've made a more general statement about that - I've seen enough stuff about it on Linux forums that it should have occurred to me. When I was doing more installs I had access to a variety of wireless cards that I could swap in and out until I found one that worked, so was a little spoiled. I really didn't start putting Linux on laptops until 2008-2009, and was working in a shop with lots of hardware I could change out as needed. Rather than troubleshooting too deep on any given distro, I would usually just throw distros at a machine until one stuck. Ubuntu, MEPIS, and PCLOS were the ones I used most, and generally one of those three would stick (with some degree of fiddling). From 2011 or so (whenever the 12.2 release was) I have been installing pretty much nothing but OpenSUSE, as it has been just dandy on everything that I've thrown it at.
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Sep 12, 2014 07:04
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everythingWasBees posted:I recently got a notebook, and was thinking about putting Arch on it. I've not used Linux in about 5 years now, and was wondering what Desktop Environments are like nowadays. I remember it was mostly KDE and GNOME2, with Enlightenment as a somewhat more finicky option, and then you could run stuff like Openbox standalone. Is that how it is, nowadays? I remember GNOME and KDE were rather resource intensive, comparatively, at the time. The big desktops are pretty much KDE and Gnome, followed by XFCE and LXDE, then to smaller ones from there. KDE seems to perform surprisingly well nowadays, at least in my anecdotal experience. I haven't run Gnome since the 2.0 days, but XFCE and LXDE have both been decent in my use of them, which involved more XFCE than LXDE.
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Oct 8, 2014 03:56
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ToxicFrog posted:I actually tried out KDE recently and I am a complete convert after disliking it for years. The huge wins for me is that it seems to have options for basically everything (without faffing around with something like gconf) and that if you select a light-on-dark theme it actually works rather than just getting horribly hosed up and/or doing nothing at all like in GNOME. My biggest complaint so far is that the systray CPU/RAM/temperature monitors aren't nearly as good as the GNOME equivalent, but everything else works so much better I'm willing to put up with that. When they jumped from KDE 3 to KDE 4 I jumped ship to Gnome 2.0, and gave them another look when I decided I didn't want Gnome 3.0. KDE 4 has matured nicely, and I spend 90% of my computing time in it now. The remaining time is mostly in Windows, and that's pretty much just for those games which don't have a Steam OS version.
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Oct 8, 2014 04:10
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reading posted:I want to use a USB wifi device, the Rosewill rnx-n180ube, on my 3.13 kernel Xubuntu laptop (64 bit). However, the only linux driver available from http://www.rosewill.com/products/1721/ProductDetail_Download.htm is for the 2.6 or 3.0 kernels. I tried make'ing it anyway from source but it didn't work because I assume my 3.13 kernel's development files are what's causing all the problems. I tried to apt-get some old 3.0 linux development files but that was a non-starter. A google search didn't turn up anything helpful. Could you use ndiswrapper and run the Windows driver as a workaround?
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Oct 10, 2014 03:52
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Elias_Maluco posted:Speaking about it, Im in need of replacing my Mint 15 here, what distro would you guys recommend for having the latest ATI drivers working without much fuckery? OpenSUSE 13.1 has been great for that on my machine with AMD graphics. I run Steam on multiple OpenSUSE installs here.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:34
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hifi posted:Do you actually have enough stuff installed where you are actually running out of space on your SSD? Stuff like any browser caches and local user applications are in various places in /home and would benefit from the SSD speedup. I turn off browser caches when I'm running of SSD, as it is my understanding they are a primary cause of wear and tear (and thus early death) for SSDs.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:05
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program666 posted:I was thinking about getting a tablet/netbook convertible and install linux in it. How much of a pain will it be? Is there a good list of linux-friendly netbooks? I'm not sure, and haven't researched it too much, but I would be concerned about proper touchscreen support. The only touchscreen I have around, aside from my phones, is an HP all-in-one that I run without touchscreen support under openSUSE 13.1. I think the primary reason I haven't been able to get the touchscreen working is that it has an old enough ATI GPU that I can't use the proprietary drivers, although in all honesty I stopped trying to get the touchscreen to work after a relatively short amount of troubleshooting - it just wasn't that high a priority for me. I run openSUSE 13.1 KDE on my low-powered Acer AO722 netbook and it does nicely, but that doesn't have a touchscreen.
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Nov 19, 2014 13:16
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evol262 posted:I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. I was thinking 5 years might be a bit too much, but having run some desktop BSD relatively recently I am pretty much in agreement. I ran PCBSD 9.2 as my main desktop for a while, and while I haven't tried the latest release yet (10.1.1 just came out today), I really doubt it would hold a candle to a good Linux desktop. I have pretty decent Internet, and the updates on PCBSD were so huge and so slow that it really detracted from the experience. In all fairness, maybe PCBSD is unfair to use as an example, but it is the BSD most directly aimed at the desktop to my knowledge.
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Feb 3, 2015 09:24
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Liam Emsa posted:Why would flash work with Firefox but not Chromium? You probably need to install the Pepper Flash plugin - I think Chromium no longer supports using the NPAPI version that Firefox uses.
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Feb 25, 2015 05:23
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funny way to spell posted:KDE, Xfce, or Cinnamon for desktop environments? I use pretty much exclusively KDE nowadays. Ran Gnome 2 for years, and used to run XFCE a fair amount, but on my current machines I run KDE. Even my netbook handles it nicely now.
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Feb 27, 2015 03:48
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ToxicFrog posted:Yes, but why would you want to? I used to do this partly out of paranoia, partly because I was distrohopping like mad and it was easier to use the one-time boot menu from BIOS to select the disk I wanted to boot than run the risk of bootloader installation going awry.
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Mar 1, 2015 03:46
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karl fungus posted:I'm trying to set up a 64-bit Linux VM on VirtualBox. AMD-V is enabled, and I've double-checked it and looked at cpuinfo too. However, VirtualBox just isn't letting me set up 64-bit VMs. What gives? What is the host OS? It seems odd to bring up in this day and age, but it should be noted that a 32-bit host cannot run 64-bit guests.
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Mar 16, 2015 05:11
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I generally just read any posts regarding systemd, as I don't feel educated enough to contribute, but just felt like mentioning that as a long-time Linux user I was aware of the furor regarding it, and was mildly leery when I upgraded from OpenSUSE 12.2 to 12.3, as it was the point where they adopted it. It has been a complete non-issue for me. In the same vein I avoided GRUB 2 for a period of time, but had zero issues after it became the default. I've been running Linux as a desktop OS since at least 2003, and it sometimes seems to me that one of the greatest sources of FUD about Linux has come from inside the community itself.
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Mar 31, 2015 04:23
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This might be hopelessly remedial, but I thought I would mention that there was a Windows update released last week that will fail if you run a dual-boot configuration or use a bootloader other than the Windows one. It's got a pretty easy workaround, just requiring a manual selection of the Windows drive from the one-time boot menu and thus using the Windows bootloader, but it failed on me several times before I bothered looking up the error and figured I might be able to save someone else the frustration.
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Apr 3, 2015 22:17
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ToxicFrog posted:As in, windows will boot fine if you boot straight into the windows VBR, but not if you load grub or syslinux and then chainload the windows VBR from there? Yep. Since my system starts off with GRUB2 the update just failed (after several minutes of thinking, and then several more of undoing itself), and generated an error that I found surprising enough to take a picture of:  I spent a lot of time doing Windows installs and reinstalls over the years, and don't remember anything quite like this popping up when Windows Update went sideways. After the second failure I finally looked it up and found it was a known issue with this update. Nice of them to have a warning about it or give any indication beforehand that it would crap out on anything other than a vanilla Windows install.
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Apr 4, 2015 03:59
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This mobo is just old enough to not have secureboot - it's a socket AM3 board with fairly old-school BIOS. The update in question is the one this knowledge base article is on: http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3033929
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Apr 4, 2015 07:40
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reading posted:So if I have Grub and use that to dual boot between linux and Win7, I just select in Windows it's own bootloader? Doesn't that mess up or overwrite Grub? I have Linux and Windows installed to their own separate drives, so for me it was just a matter of using the one-time boot menu to select the Windows drive instead of the Linux drive where GRUB 2 lives. Totally passive in these circumstances. If you have both operating systems installed on the same drive then you might have to jump through more hoops than I had to.
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Apr 5, 2015 21:27
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