Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 vs. Early Fedora 13 Benchmarks 157
Given that early benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx were less than encouraging, Phoronix decided to take the latest alpha out for a spin and has set it side-by-side with an early look at Fedora 13. "Overall, there are both positive and negative performance changes for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures."
Beta performance testing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Beta performance testing (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm just a naive ubuntu 9.10 user, but if nothing else: it recovers journal and, especially, fscks fast. Haven't noticed any speed difference in standard use, but I haven't really cared to measure.
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fscks fast.
I wonder if it is fast enough for my wife to give up her Mac and return to Ubuntu?
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I also have to say that for a site that does so much benchmarking, phoronix is incredibly unprofessional. How about error bars on those bar graphs? Are caches cleared before each benchmark? Etc.
What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features? (Score:4, Insightful)
Catering to niche users at the expense of the majority.
Removing functionality from X. Deleting the ability to restore a feature.
Making it damn near impossible to troubleshoot X crashes.
Ppppppp-p p p ulseaudio
I'm not much enthused by Ubuntu anymore.
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It's all worked perfectly for me on the three computers I've tried it on, PulseAudio included. The ability to move audio from one output device to another is awesome - Windows certainly can't do it!
Re:What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features? (Score:5, Funny)
Shut up! It is a known fact that pulse audio sucks for EVERYONE.
Re:What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features? (Score:4, Funny)
Shut up! It is a known fact that pulse audio sucks for EVERYONE.
Speak up, we Ubuntu users can't hear a word you're saying !
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Oh man, you haven't gotten your audio drivers working either? Tell me about it... Preferably through IM, SMS or TTY.
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Even though PA has had it's share of compatibility problems, it is working much better now. Things (sound devices) that never worked before actually work now and switching between them is possible -- on the fly --, when they weren't working at all before. It's so great to be able to use high quality audio for music/games, and a USB headset for phone calls.
Things are looking up on the PA front.
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Windows 7 or Vista instructions: Right-click on the little speaker icon in the bottom right. Click "Playback devices". Right-click on the device you want to use instead of you current device. Click "Set as Default Device". The audio output will instantly switch to that device.
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Windows 7 or Vista instructions: Right-click on the little speaker icon in the bottom right. Click "Playback devices". Right-click on the device you want to use instead of you current device. Click "Set as Default Device". The audio output will instantly switch to that device.
I assumed the GP was referring to the ability to move sound from between output devices on different computers. In the middle of playing. (Both machines running PulseAudio, of course) This is what makes PulseAudio worth the growing pains that it has been.
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Ultimately the response to that is the same as the response to people who claim a Linux feature doesn't work.
The Windows driver API is open and you can code against it, why not write your own playback device that outputs over the network?
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Ultimately the response to that is the same as the response to people who claim a Linux feature doesn't work.
And ultimately the response to *that* is the *same* as the response Windows users give...
The Windows driver API is open and you can code against it, why not write your own playback device that outputs over the network?
Which is, why go through all that effort when that feature already works on Linux?
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I'm going to agree with the sibling here. I always hear about people bashing pulseaudio, but I've never had any issues with it. I also particularly enjoy the low-latency networked audio features. I can play the audio from my movie on the laptop through the speakers at my computer when it's connected to the TV. Which is great, because the desktop's real close and my TV speakers suck.
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Your mileage may vary. I did have slight p-problems with pulseaudio in their earlier versions, now I don't have them anymore, they were fixed for me. Anyway, Pulseaudio is very handy for my bluetooth headset. Rerouting audio streams is also very convenient.
Re:What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seriously. On my desktop, the audio for an application would start out fine and then gradually fade to static in 5-10 seconds. What kind of a bug would do that? It's mind-boggling.
Anyway I installed some manager app and fiddled mindlessly with settings for a while, which magically fixed it.
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I concur.
The last two upgrades left me without sound until I purged pulseaudio with fire.
I understand what it's supposed to do. If it would do that, I'd absolutely love it. I'm psyched about the possibilities. But at the moment, I can't get it to function.
I have ALSA, and it works. I need to be able to "sudo apt-get install pulseaudio", reboot, and have that work. I've spent years of my life fucking around with audio under linux. I'm at the point where if it works, I'm not going to
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"I'm not much enthused by Ubuntu anymore."
It's virtues are ease of installation and convenience of adding useful software that isn't included in "purist" distros, but Ubuntu is the "AOL"
of the Linux world.AOL was once very useful to masses of users. They don't need it any more...
Given the indifference of Ubuntu management to release quality Ubuntu won't be useful much longer. The beauty of Linux is that there are and will remain many alternatives.
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It's been a while since I've last used a distro, rather than used metaphorical duct tape to keep patching my old system. What's the least-grief choice nowadays?
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I have not found one. After Ubuntu shat pablum residue on my system I tried in order.
Kubuntu, wow KDE is shit when it used to blow gnome awway.
Madrivel It just didn't work and is alien enough to be unconfigurable.
SUSE It had serious X issues.
Fedora 10, it sort of worked and I could deal with it. Upgraded to 11 and have so far managed to keep sound working for the few hours I need it a day. Via one of the alternative yum repositories efforts 3D works for ATI. I even managed to get Doom3 to talk to pppulseaud
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conversely 9.10 is the closest to 100% perfect on my aspire one. Pulseaudio isn't quite there hence /bin/sh -c "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1 skype"
Its a trick which ensures skype uses the alsa drivers without interference from pulse.
I'm not going to claim 9.10 is good for everyone but its not bad for everyone either.
I've been with ubuntu for enough revisions that every release has its problems and a flurry of updates following each release.
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The X issue is CTRL-ALT-BKSP, it's gone and all I got were snide remarks and derision when I asked how to get it back. It's gone from Fedora as well but they had a method to get it restored. It's tedious and pedantic.
It does not work from the login screen. (Score:2)
It's a hack. Fedora did it right.
I wish they'd stop (Score:1, Interesting)
I wish they'd stop focusing on increasing performance by a few milliseconds here and there and work out why my upgrades never work, or flash objects turn grey and i have to restart firefox or why my audio is choppy, and why the nvidia drivers make Xorg fail randomly or why I have to press the power button on my PC to take it off after everthing is unloaded.
Flash Player is proprietary (Score:3, Insightful)
or flash objects turn grey and i have to restart firefox
You'll have to ask Adobe about that one. Ubuntu developers cannot trace into software for which they do not have the source code. Or is this happening to you in Gnash?
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LOL! Flash works just fine without all of this nonsense in Firefox on Windows 7. Never crashes. Just works.
And I didn't pay a dime for my copy of Windows 7. It was just like downloading a Linux distro that works perfectly.
WTF are you guys torturing yourself with this stuff? Go download a copy of Windows 7 and enjoy. Install Virtual PC (free) or VMWare (free) and muck with your toy OS there when you feel bored.
But my GOD! Stop torturing yourself with this crashing Flash Player nonsense!
Funny, the 64-bit Flash Player 10 works just fine in my Debian Linux machine.
:(
I'm probably doing something wrong, perhaps I should mess around and try to break things (I've simply installed the plug-in and it worked - silly me).
Well, perhaps it's the damned 64-bit Google Chrome for Linux I'm running...
Ohmygosh, I've just realised... ALL my OS and its applications are 64-bit! And it's all working, and fast!
Bad, bad Linux!
Oh, and you are also inciting copyright infrigement, that's so cute.
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I'm using Lenny (yeah, I'm quite conservative with the software I use).
I've noticed there are some (I found only one, actually) audio boards (or their drivers) which are unable to simultaneous playback. Not my case though, and I'm using a SB Live 5.1.
Another possibility is that the other software is using OSS (instead of ALSA) for sound output, while Adobe's Flash uses ALSA (OSS is deprecated, as you may know) and that is causing conflicts. AFAIR Adobe's Flash used to use OSS befo
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The attitude "we don't care if software which is not distributed by us breaks on OS upgrade" is not going to fly for long
That wouldn't be a problem if third-party software developers would share their source code with Canonical. Someone could debug into it and easily discover the problem. But apparently, source access would break some third-party software developers' business models.
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Why test alphas... (Score:2)
Alphas aren't even feature complete... Wait at least for beta...? I mean, the roles could be reversed in the beta, or next alpha.
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It is worth testing to pick up regressions so that you can fix them. Something like the extreme Postgre slowdown they showed. It is better to catch that at the alpha stage.
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Slow news day apparently.
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Or worse, comparing an alpha of one distro to a prealpha of another distro, as if the numbers are at all useful. It tells us nothing about their individual speeds by the time we'll be using them, and tell us nothing useful about the speed of either distro. WTF?
what is the state of ext4? (Score:2)
I remember reading that ext4 loses data. Has this been addressed?
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You could lose data on it, if your software is poorly-written. Ext4 now caters to this poorly-written software, which is why it's lost some of its performance.
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Re:what is the state of ext4? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it breaks user's expectations or destroys user's data, no matter how much anyone tries to convince me otherwise, it is a bug.
Re:what is the state of ext4? (Score:4, Insightful)
They resolved an issue which lead to file being overwritten being left empty on a crash. The problem was that they were optimising the write order to make performance better. This lead to metadata being updated too early in some cases so you would get a corrupted file. Now the issue has been resolved which lowered the performance although I think there may be an option you could turn on. So if an application is updating the file you will get the old version or the new version (assuming they have written the program in a half decent way) of the file which is good enough. If you want anything better than that you should be running a UPS which should be correctly configured to safely shut the system down (unlike one system I experienced that had a UPS but then everything crashed when the UPS ran out of battery because the sysadmins were appalling).
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That's not the point, the expectation developers and users had changed from Ext3 and the people in charge of Ext4 adamantly and arrogantly claimed the same things you are.
But most people don't have UPSes and expect the filesystem to Do The Right Thing(tm) and that is, try to keep their data intact. Users should not be expected to have to tweak arcane settings, and user programs should not even have the right to alter those settings.
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My beef is that the Ext4 Gods decided that performance was more important than user's data, changed some settings and caused a shitstorm when people en masse disagreed with them. Their perspective was essentially, to the programmers, change your code, or, to the users, use a UPS or turn off write caching.
This was beyond arrogant. Apparently the problem is solved because the developers backed down because of the controversy.
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The issue was that there were certain operations that behaved differently before and after the "upgrade" to EXT4, and I specifically said:
In this case, Ext4 changes some expectations that users (and programmers, who are ultimately users too.) Now supposedly some of these issues have been resolved. That's good, but I recall some significant discussion on Slashdot in the past and the same naysayers came along saying "Why try to anticipate a power outage?"
Well, w
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Consider when a typical application exits. It does something like:
* Write new config file to a temporary file
* Rename the temporary file over the top of the old config file
This way if the computer crashes, applications expect the config file to always be valid. i.e. they expect the data to have been written to disk, completely, before the rename happens.
This worked in ext3 and other filesystems, but originally not in ext4. The result was that the config file could end up being empty.
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I would say they expect the data to be written to the VFS layer with intact happens-before relations, so the later rename renames the complete new file contents. Whether or not anything is physically written to the d
Why Ubuntu? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Why compare Ubuntu with anything? In my experience it's Debian, with a horrible colour scheme and a screwed up GUI. It's gone downhill so fast it's been like a toboggan ride.
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Because right now it is the msot popular flavor of Linux with Fedora not far behind.
Use another OS if it bothers you that much.
In what ways?
I LIKE the toboggan ride (Score:1, Troll)
Re:I LIKE the toboggan ride (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no 'compiling of the kernel, no conf files to edit' in Debian or any other mainstream distro either. Hell, even Arch Linux does well without custom kernel compilations, and most editing of config files as well, IIRC (depends on usage of course; not that I'd recommend it to any newbie anyway).
The 'it just works' factor isn't something unique for Ubuntu: almost all the others have it as well (LFS an exception). The only thing Ubuntu gives you is a package that will mostly fit the average desktop user in the default install. Pretty much like Mandriva and others. Kernel compilation is not and has not been necessary for more than ten years for any of the mainstream distros.
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Shut up! Don't you know Ubuntu is the ONLY linux distribution that does not require to write kernel modules in assembly by yourself ?
Re:I LIKE the toboggan ride (Score:4, Funny)
Shut up! Don't you know Ubuntu is the ONLY linux distribution that does not require to write kernel modules in assembly by yourself ?
I'm glad they finally switched to assembly, I've misplaced my paper card puncher and I've been afraid to reboot ever since !
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Let me air my grievances too: I have recently set up a vps with ubuntu and was just horrified by the package management. There is aptitude, apt-*, and dpkg-*, all of them are verbose and none of them seem to do what I tell to do.
I wanted to remove apache: "aptitude remove apache" didn't do anything useful and "aptitude remove apache2.2-common" wanted to install something else. Finally I just put ArchLinux in a chroot and was done with it.
mod me -1 drunk if you must
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That may be an exaggeration, but I kind of agree. I've been using ubuntu since Edgy, steadily upgrading, and am now using Karmic. Starting with Jaunty, and now continuing with Karmic, I've been having multiple serious problems with sound. Karmic is also causing me several problems where they changed something and made sure it worked with Gnome, but it doesn't work properly with other WMs: 1 [launchpad.net], 2 [launchpad.net].
What often really matters are the upstream apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
What often really matters are the upstream apps. Often, other than reporting an upstream bug in an application to the developer, there is not much one can really do about bugs in upstream applications like KDE. I am seeing that now with KDE and X.org. Currently, there is a bug in evdev and dga in X that prevents X from working right with a Wiimote. It can't really be fixed by the distributor. Only X.org can fix it.
So far I have:
Broken Sound effects on Stratagus. (Mandriva 2010.0)
Broken GLX Support on QuakeForge. (Mandriva 2010.0) But DarkPlaces Quake still works.
Broken Wiimote Support in the evdev driver.
These are just a few examples of applications that don't work becaues of a problem upstream.
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Broken Wiimote Support in the evdev driver.
I must've missed something... when did Nintendo switch over to using standard HID protocols instead of their proprietary wiimote one which has never worked on any OS's standard input driver?
rubbish (Score:2)
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unless of course it is a windows alpha or beta, then it is blazing fast and feature rich. Sigh....
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And, of course, must faster than the final release.
Grub2 and FakeRAID (Score:2)
Wake me when Grub2 supports FakeRAID...
Come again? (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell is a bad performance improvement?
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What the hell is a bad performance improvement?
You're so analytical! Sometimes you just have to let /. summaries... flow... over you.
Totally useless (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, let me say that I use Ubuntu 9.10 on my system at work. I am also running CentOS on servers, various Ubuntu on servers and a couple of Fedora systems. As you can see, I have experience with all of them.
So why is this review useless? Because they are testing development systems, which are not optimized, have loads of debugging flags set, and essentially are not ready for prime time. Of course it may be running slower!
IMHO, you should ignore benchmarks until the release candidates, at least. I generally ignore benchmarks on unreleased systems. I do, however, like to read and learn about new features which may be present in early releases.
Waste of time (Score:2)
Well that was a waste of time, wasn't it? Durrrr.
Misguided (Score:2)
What's the point of your 'benchmark' then?
Trolls are fun (Score:4, Interesting)
By pulling a computer from a dumpster, outfitting it with a $100 hard disk, and installing Linux, I get a giant file server, saving me $200 on an easy backup solution (vs. Apple's Time Capsule). That makes me $200 richer than I would be otherwise, meaning I can use that money elsewhere. With the money I've saved over the years thanks to Linux and other open-source packages, I will soon be taking a Caribbean cruise. Has your "real" Mac ever paid for your vacation?
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By pulling a computer from a dumpster, outfitting it with a $100 hard disk, and installing Linux, I get a giant file server, saving me $200 on an easy backup solution (vs. Apple's Time Capsule). That makes me $200 richer than I would be otherwise, meaning I can use that money elsewhere. With the money I've saved over the years thanks to Linux and other open-source packages, I will soon be taking a Caribbean cruise. Has your "real" Mac ever paid for your vacation?
Little do you realize that your "dumpster" computer pulls quite a bit more power then the power miser time capsule (30w maximum). Considering the cost of electricity a 100w device costs around ~100 a year to run (24/7). So over two years, you are at a negative with your dumpster computer, not to mention the extra time spent setting it up.
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Last I measured, it averaged 35 watts.
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Well all the data (google) I can find on the timecapsule is that it takes approximately 12-13 watts. So payoff period is more like 8-10 years instead of 2
While Linux is nice (I develop on it for a living), I find that to many people blindly say its better. Even just considering power management, I find windows or even mac can save you a little money with better made drivers. You need to make sure you have the right device to do the job, and the upfront cost of linux doesn't always justify it's use.
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In many years, about the time it breaks even, it'll be up for replacement anyway. By that time, I've earned a couple dollars for free in interest on that initially-saved $200.
I'm not blindly stating anything. Rather, I'm countering a blind statement against it. There are also too many people who accept the marketing spin about corporate products being better on some arbitrary level.
If you're going to claim that running Windows will save me money in the long run, I want proof. Are there any reputable tests s
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Congrats on your cruise...
What backup software did you use? I use backintime for my father who works from his home as a translator and really hates re-doing his work. Albeit, I don't use NAS, just a 500Gb external USB disk drive and a cheap UPS -- power outages were somewhat common in the area. It will still take him about 10 years to fill the disk with hourly incremental backups.
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sshfs and cp. I've recently also started using Subversion for some projects where previous revisions are still necessary. Yes, it's ugly, but it works enough for my needs.
Fact is, I really don't need to back up much. If I lose my collection of "hey this could be fun" programs, I don't care. How many times does one REALLY need to calculate pi, anyway?
I also like to keep my backups organized differently from my actual system, so most image and image-like backups are not feasible.
Re: backups (Score:2)
Instead of sshfs+cp, if you want to perform incremental backups without wasting space (duplicating storage), you might try rsync with hardlinks. It appears back-in-time can do this also.
This article is great:
http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups_2010.html [sanitarium.net]
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I put a £50 hard disk into an old Mac (I didn't pull it out of a dumpster but I did get it for free) that now serves as my Time Machine backup disk.
Apart from paying pounds for my hard disk, since I live in the UK, how is that different?
It was clear the AC troll initially doesn't represent any sort of starting point for discussion of Apple vs totally open source solutions, and it should also be clear to you that the Time Capsule isn't the only way to use Time Machine and is generally unsuitable for mo
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Not being much of a Mac person myself, I only initially compared my setup to the Time Capsule because of the AC's apparent love for Macs.
My fiancée has the only Mac in our house (triple-booting), and at one point I set up my server to act as a Time Capsule for her. It still got the fancy interface.
Really, it's just a matter of preference. I prefer the feel of a keyboard to a mouse, and would rather type out a few commands than drag and drop icons. My initial comment was more against the AC's financial
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Money does not concern me. I'm far more concerned with getting the most quality for the price. In cruises, quality really depends on what line you go with. Sure, you can go with the bottom-dollar line, offering little more comfort than steerage on a freighter, but a better line is still quite luxurious. My preferred line is pretty nice. It's not the most expensive line, but offers quite enough amenities to suit me.
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Does it provide a configurable "vibration mode"?
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buy a mac homos! or are you too poor to afford a real computer?
To put it bluntly, your beloved Mac is an expensive x86 PC with a fancy case design.
I wouldn't be surprised if the very same chinese Mac factories also produce cheapo generic boards.
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They probably do. But the parts for the mac boards are sourced from different suppliers, which is what makes all the difference.
Re:linux is for cock smoking queers. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, the inductors and transformers for Macs are hand-rolled on the thighs of virgins.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org]
Dell and a few other companies have been bitten by the bug. Depending on who you source your parts from depends on the quality (and longevity) of your computers (and reputation). I have no doubt that the parts going into a $120 Intel brand motherboard cost a few cents more each than a similar AsRock or ECS Elitegroup board that costs half as much. You get what you pay for. Intel stuff generally doesn't break in the same decade you buy it. You're lucky to
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If it breaks before the warranty period expires, you get a new one. If you make it to the end of the warranty period before it breaks, you have to buy a new one. So you may wish to rethink that statement ;).
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You still have to mail it back to the manufacturer, wait for them to confirm it's broke, and then mail you a new one from china. Plus crack open the computer, and deal with all the MS "you've installed new hardware" BS. For a $40 piece of equipment. Getting a new warranty replacement piece of equipment from a bargain bin manufacturer might take longer than the warranty is good for (three months). Gigabyte and ASUS are better about their parts, but you have to ask yourself "how much BS am I willing to put up
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30 year old MALE virgins whose sexual innocence is the result of poor hygiene and high functioning autism.
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and it's software(incl. backup system) and different gadets that works together well without you have to waste time maintaining it or figure out how to get it to work.
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If only I didn't have to write a script for ubuntu to reload my wireless modules periodically. At least its brightness actually controls my backlight, so I didn't have to script a hack like I did for 7.04. There's more bullshit, I just don't remember it now. I only wish that I didn't have to use the cli in ubuntu.
ubuntu has gotten easy enough to work for the technically-capable person who doesn't want to bother too much with details. it's still not something I'd recommend to an average user, unfortunately.
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The backlight thing was not specific to my hardware.
The wireless thing... well, maybe it is. But since Intel as apparently cooperating to get decent linux drivers developed, it's hard to believe that I could do much better except by getting lucky. (http://intellinuxwireless.org/)
If there is no systematic approach by which I can get good, up-to-date hardware that's linux-compatible, then claiming "hardware incompatibility" is kind of a weak excuse.
If Canonical got into hardware and developed an ultraportable