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I can recommend running it on new hardware. I love that it runs great on old hardware, but it is a bit of a disservice to Linux distros that people always experience it on raspberry pies and other old laptops or otherwise relatively slow hardware.
Linux on a brand new hardware is insanely good.
Edit: software => hardware
Ehhhhhh I wouldn’t say brand new hardware. A lot of times Linux still needs a few months to properly support a new Gen of graphics cards or processors
Though it generally at least works which is a huge improvement over back in the day
I actually had my most difficult time ever setting up Linux on my 5800X3D and 3070 recently.
PopOS wouldn’t save my resolution on reboot, and then after fixing it all of my games were running at the wrong resolution or breaking in various frustrating ways. All Linux native games too. Jumped to Fedora and every single game flickered like mad and then once I got that fixed my package manager inexplicably broke. I was about to install Ubuntu before saying fuck any chance of instability and going to Debian.
I had to manually install way more than any of the other distros, but everything just worked once I got my graphics driver installed. I was really disappointed given I’ve been using Linux on and off for 8 years, and my Steam Deck has been nothing but solid. I’m honestly just disappointed things have trended in a bad direction, and I hope this was just a one off experience and not the norm now.
Nvidia has always been a pain and that’s really Nvidia’s fault not Linux’s
Even in the past I’ve had nowhere near as many non-GPU related issues. Some GUI elements in Gnome just did not work, and at one point I was getting low USB power errors even though the USB drive and port were known good. The amount of workarounds I had to attempt to implement before settling on Debian was insane.
My primary laptop is a Lenovo T495s. I’m a big fan because my requirements for a laptop aren’t particularly demanding, but while a 5 year old Ryzen 7 is a bit aged, I’d hardly consider it underpowered, at least for my (and many others) needs. Laptops like this can easily be found in great condition and under $200. I spent a little more after a new nvme and maxing out ram.
I see what you’re saying, but I also think it’s actually a mark in Linux’ favor that is continues to run so well on older or underpowered hardware. It’s how I really got into it, being broke and able to eke out years more life on older computers when I could ill afford upgrades. These days, I’m happy that I can get off the upgrade treadmill for longer. The most demanding games I’ve installed are the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters and Grandia. I’m not a programmer, don’t have to render graphical stuff for work, etc, so it’s pretty great that I don’t have to worry about my budget desktop being unusable in 4 years because the OS devs have made it a practical impossibility to run on older hardware. I’ve got 32GB of RAM, and my biggest threat to usability is leaving Firefox running with a ton of open tabs for weeks on end, which can conveniently be solved by closing Firefox and watching my RAM use plummet.
Not everyone is going to be a gamer, graphics designer or programmer that really needs the latest and greatest in hardware. In fact, I’d wager the majority of people won’t notice an improvement outside of a few cases. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD, <16GB of RAM to >16GB of RAM and from an older graphics card to a newer one that supports 4K are pretty easy differences to note in normal use. Those aside, I think most people would be hard-pressed to identify an objective difference in the quality of their browsing and word processing experiences. Depending on how flexible people are with adapting to different workflows, even those could be minimized, to an extent. I have a desktop I bought second hand twenty years ago that served as my main computer into and beyond my initial forays in university. It has a whopping two cores, and I think I might have managed to get 16GB of RAM into it. It’d probably suck for web browsing and wouldn’t be terribly efficient for power use, but I bet you if I reinstalled things, it would work just fine for serving up my music library via mpd, playing it with ncmpcpp and writing term papers in Auctex, same as it did back then. Even if I put an older version of Windows on it like Windows 7, I bet it would struggle to run those same programs on top of the base OS. That’s legitimately impressive, when you think about it.
Thank you for the nice write-up. I agree that it is great and whatis very impressive. Also to see old hardware not going to a landfill. I have definitely “fixed” up friend and elderlies computers by installing Ubuntu, and more lately I tried fedora silver blue for a friend. And I too have second hand ThinkPads, a P53 6 core, 64gb, rtx3000 and a t440 and then my work machine is a xps13 (not secondhand). It runs great on all of these and linux is a real workhorse.
I think my point of view come from windows “techies” that seem to be completely oblivious to Linux outside of running it on a Raspberry pi or the like, and linux is only as a way to “save” a computer because windows can’t run on it anymore. To me, Linux is a first choice for server, workstations, home use, gaming… really anything, but I might be biased… like most of us in this forum 😅😉
I’m actually a little scared of running Linux on modern, fast hardware.
How is multi-GPU driver support?
My main machine is a 900 TFlops compute monster (4 GPUs) running ROCM on Windows, and the last time I’d tried Manjaro on Desktop, it seized up for unknown reasons.
I’ve got asynchronous monitors - 1440p@165Hz main display and 4K@85Hz flipped vertical for a side monitor. Occasionally, I plug in a projector which is 1080p, mirrored to the 4K, but flipped horizontal.
I’m not sure what I’d done wrong because it works perfectly on my 11 year old Z575 (Debian+KDE there).
What distro would you recommend for an extremely fast/high RAM machine? I’ve got 128GB of main system memory, and 4TB of M.2 for a system disk running at 7.6 gigabytes/second actual/real-world RW I/O.
well ROCM is supported in Linux https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/
I’ve installed it on my (single) AMD GPU (I thought it was for something else) on EndeavourOS (which is, obvs, arch btw :D).
I’ve been using endeavourOS for about 1y now, after a few years of Mint (and 20years of everything else. Yes, I’ve used gentoo as well back when it was only install from stage1). It does feel faster (on the same hw) but I’ve never done any real benchmarking, so it could be just “new shiny feeling faster”. I’ve found an article a few weeks ago comparing boot/compression speeds of different distros. In your particular case I wouldn’t be using Debian as I feel you’d need quite up-to-date drivers, and Debian is conservative (and that’s a good thing personally, I use it on my servers).
Just install Linux Mint and be done. Just a side note but there is no such thing as “drivers” like there are on Windows. Everything is baked into the kernel. If you run Nvidia you will need to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. These aren’t like Windows drivers but they are external.
Linux on the t430 is such a smooth experience though
Be me
Discover linux in an effort to be able to customize your desktop and make it look like the haxxors in movies at 12 years old
???
Woops … Linuxed too hard and became a cloud infrastructure engineer.
FUCK!
Wiggly windows in compiz probably converted like 10 thousand 12 year olds to linux… I know from experience!
ABSO fucking lutely … that and the flaming mouse effect
I thought I was the coolest cat in the litter XD
Don’t forget about the whole desktop rain effect!
Damn no reason for you to get on here and call me out so directly. Also I still have wobbly windows and the modern version of desklets. No shame.
I am gonna go set those up today lol, I miss it.
Hey, I’m old AF. I STILL use wobble windows!
Cloud infrastructure engineer at 12 years old? Damn son!
Yep. Same here :)
I look at this meme and lift my hand gently from the track-pad revealing the uncanny logo, ThinkPad and I think: Yes, this meme is for me.
Well, if it’s good enough for the ISS, it’s good enough for me.
now I gotta become an astronaut and be the first to install gentoo in space
Ah shit, I just accidentally unmounted the Soyuz module and the canadarm drivers haven’t been working since the hobbyist maintaining them for free got tired of abusive comments from NASA engineers and took up farming instead, so hopefully we don’t need to evacuate before they send up another one.
Doesn’t the ISS run Debian?
Edit: Yes, they introduced Debian on user devices back in 2013
Set it and forget it… can’t argue with that.
I fully support Linux and FOSS but, who the fuck pays for windows (not talking about pre installed computers).
It’s not about paying for Windows, usually it’s included in the device you buy. The real reason why Linux helps broke people is because bloated Windows can’t run on the budget PCs they have (and they can’t just buy a faster computer)
I mean you pay for Windows on preinstalled computers, too. There are Laptops sold without OS and they are cheaper than the same model with windows installed.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned preinstall, as in who would pay for one if they are not forced to?
I get what you mean. I just cant wrap my head around how many people buy windows without even realizing it and think they get it for free or some stuff
I’ve seen people pay for office, usually it was less tech savvy people that had enough money and thought pirating is in fact stealing.
I did once. I built a pc. I hated the watermark. Y’all hadn’t enlightened me yet
The watermark annoys me so I grab one of those £20 fell of the back of a truck keys.
There’s a github script to activate Windows for free
You mean slmgr or something 3rd party?
third party. Mas
I think the point is you can put a fully updated new Linux on a decade old ThinkPad but with windows you’d need to buy a whole new laptop to run modern stuff also it would be unusably slow
Just pay 10$ and you don’t have to dread updates
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As in, I’ve rarely seen people pay for windows except for pre installs.
My daily driver laptop is the T410 I found at a thrift store for $5.
People don’t mention it much but I think it’s actually the most powerful thing about Linux (and open source more broadly) that it’s free to use. It doesn’t matter if you’re down on your luck, were born in a poor nation through no fault of your own, or are working class and getting crushed by the capitalist economy. It’s a leveller and, in my view, represents power, resilience and dignity in solidarity. It’s literally one of the few important things left in the world that we have like that.
Free cost and free as in freedom to understand and modify the code. I also think it’s a beautiful way of doing things. We also have Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. The internet has a tremendous potential for collaboration, people doing things because they want to, for the benefit of everyone.
I totally agree! I wish I could contribute more to these things that I use, but it also (and maybe more importantly) makes me want to be more free and generous with all the things I can do. Looking at how most things are today, superficially it seems far-fetched to imagine economies of generosity but actually I think it’s got a lot of power to perpetuate itself.
I’ll just use my steam deck for writing code. Thanks though, boss.
If it wasn’t for those rascally penguins I would be flat broke trying to afford the latest system requirements for Windows 12 or a mediocre MacBook instead of a $120 5 year old Dell Latitude, how dare they!!
Linux all the way, comrades!
Why are you marking all your comments with “anti commercial ai license”? Are you licensing them so you can fight a court war if your comments get used for AI training?
It’s idealistic, but may turn into action someday if did happen. If others participated in licensing their comments, it could even lead to a class action lawsuit, which could discourage commercial AI vendors even more and embolden opensource AI vendors.
It’s publicly avaliable information. Who would care if their comments are used to train an AI?
Online persona would
I just wrote that I care. What’s the point of asking such an insipid question?
Also, because something is shown publicly copyright doesn’t exist? Is that seriously your take?
Also, because something is shown publicly copyright doesn’t exist?
No, I just mainly don’t understand what the whole AI freakout is about. If some companies want to use random redditors shitposts to train an ai, I don’t know why anyone would care.
Just threw Zorin on my secondhand x220, but been using the Thinkpad as a low end test bench so that may change. Runs surprisingly well, although I do need a new battery soon (“dies” at ~40%).
Should I feel ashamed as I migrated from second hand Thinkpads to second hand Dell Latitude? I got a 7410 for 300€ 2 years ago and I really have no complaint about it. And it looks better (personal opinion).
I’m rich asf and not even capable to operate a coffee maker - still using Linux. Whaddaya say now?!
Bravo 👏.
I used a Chromebook as my daily driver for years. It had a celeron and 4gb of ram. I ran galliumos for awhile then switched to Ubuntu because it seemed to work the best on there. It had great battery life, I’d get around 6-7 hours just doing web browsing and terminals.
