Wished I had tried Linux long ago.

[nukeboyt]

My QNIX 2560 x 1440 monitor quits working when I install the Nvidia drivers. I searched around and found some settings for the xorg.conf that allowed it to work. Life was good until I tried to add a second monitor with different resolution. I failed to make a copy of the xorg.conf file and ended up unable to boot to either monitor. I could have corrected it with my live usb-stick, but I decided to move on to Ubuntu

[White Owl]

The adventure continues. After several missteps and newbie mistakes, Catalyst is working correctly and I have anti-aliasing in KSP. ('Cause the game really does look terrible without AA, more so than some other titles.) No tearing, but there is a strange kind of stutter-slowdown every couple of seconds; it's barely noticeable. So I've avoided whatever bugs make some ATI graphics cards unusable with Linux.

I decided to not even mess with getting the game to run in a different directory. Not for now, anyway.

Next step: get my two recording programs working. If I can run KSP, Dxtory and Audacity all at the same time with high quality... that's all I want out of Linux right now.

[steve_v]

...using 'relatime' as a mount option.

Another one of those things I often forget to mention, as I've been setting up fstab by hand for as long as I can remember.

I actually use 'noatime' on drives I'm never going to want to audit.

[steve_v]

...there is a strange kind of stutter-slowdown every couple of seconds; it's barely noticeable.

Yeah, there is (with NVIDIA too, so it's not the GPU driver). I'm not sure what's causing it either - best guess so far is monos garbage collector. There's a better one in place in the current mainstream mono, but Unitys fork is a wee bit behind.

Enabling multithreading for the builtin GC improves matters, but it also introduces memory leaks

If anybody has other ideas I'm all ears, 'tis fairly annoying.

AMD needs some serious poking regarding the driver bugs though, this has been going on far too long.

Edited November 24, 2014 by steve_v

[steve_v]

I failed to make a copy of the xorg.conf file and ended up unable to boot to either monitor.

You know you can fix Xorg issues from the console, right?

Boot /= GUI. Unlike Windows, the GUI is just another layer & the system is quite useable for most tasks without it.

In fact, you can have a graphical web-browser (wit a mouse even!), video playback, full multi-tasking etc. without even starting Xorg.

Edited November 24, 2014 by steve_v

[White Owl]

Alrighty then. KSP and Audacity work perfectly well in Linux. SimpleScreenRecorder was a pain in the ass to set up, but now appears to be working. So that looks like everything I need. Next step: install my ten craptons of mods and start recording.

[Ravenchant]

Thinking of switching as well, at least on my laptop.

Back in high school, we used to work with an old version of Debian...I think, and it was less than stellar. But things seem to have improved I'm running OpenOffice, Gnuplot, GIMP and Inkscape anyway, so it shouldn't be much of a shock. Would you recommend Ubuntu or Mint?

Also, I heard bad things about Wine HQ, so it's probably good that the old thing can't run any games

[LordFerret]

Thinking of switching as well, at least on my laptop.

Back in high school, we used to work with an old version of Debian...I think, and it was less than stellar. But things seem to have improved I'm running OpenOffice, Gnuplot, GIMP and Inkscape anyway, so it shouldn't be much of a shock. Would you recommend Ubuntu or Mint?

Also, I heard bad things about Wine HQ, so it's probably good that the old thing can't run any games

Ubuntu is popular, but I like Mint better. If I'm recalling correctly, Mint is not a monolithic kernel (at least one of the releases anyway), so it's not such a hog on lightweight machines.

[LordFerret]

Alrighty then. KSP and Audacity work perfectly well in Linux. SimpleScreenRecorder was a pain in the ass to set up, but now appears to be working. So that looks like everything I need. Next step: install my ten craptons of mods and start recording.

Just for giggles, you should burn and check out a live disk of AV Linux ... it's all that and more.

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

[steve_v]

Mint is not a monolithic kernel

Technically, all Linux kernels are 'monolithic' though the definition blurs a bit when you take into account loadable modules.

For a really lightweight system, nothing beats a hand-compiled kernel though.

I'm not sure what the minimum space requirement for a modern kernel is, but back in the 2.0.X days you could get a cli OS on a single 1.44MB floppy

It did involve rabbits though, and hats.

This, for example, is a fully functional router distro. I did a bit of hacking on it long ago, surprised it's still around TBH.

Edited November 25, 2014 by steve_v

[LordFerret]

Not seen that one. A knockoff of Sco Unix?

Have you looked at Peppermint? Supposed to be lightweight and web/cloud centric. I played with a live disk of it for a little, but didn't interest me.

[White Owl]

And after all that, the game gets unplayable framerates with any more than a dozen or so parts loaded in scene.

[steve_v]

Not seen that one. A knockoff of Sco Unix?

IIRC it's more a play on 'free cisco'. It's pretty cool. I used to have a real beast of a 486 (120MHZ!) running this, lived in the basement doing ADSL routing / firewall duties plus some custom mods of my own to take voice messages with the fallback dialup modem, compress them to mp3 (SLOW) and send them out by email

Encoding time wasn't important, but with a heavily optimised mpg123 build it was _just_ fast enough for realtime playback - with ~85% CPU usage.

Finding software to deal with the voice functions of the modem & convert its unusual recording format was... interesting. Much digging through ancient FTP sites

The DXL4 CPU was also the first I encountered that had a fan, one day it fell off... and nothing happened

Edited November 25, 2014 by steve_v

[Albert VDS]

There's a lot of people using Ubuntu, which is a great starting distro (just like Linux Mint)

Xubuntu would be a lightweight version of Ubuntu. If you want lighter then you could try Sparky Linux.

If you want lighter still then Crunch Bang Linux might be the fastest under the debian forks.

Personally I like Arch Linux, it puts you in control and is a pretty fast distro.

Technically, all Linux kernels are 'monolithic' though the definition blurs a bit when you take into account loadable modules.

For a really lightweight system, nothing beats a hand-compiled kernel though.

I'm not sure what the minimum space requirement for a modern kernel is, but back in the 2.0.X days you could get a cli OS on a single 1.44MB floppy

It did involve rabbits though, and hats.

This, for example, is a fully functional router distro. I did a bit of hacking on it long ago, surprised it's still around TBH.

Compiling your own kernel doesn't have any noticeable speed effect, it's from a time where every MHz mattered.

The only reason an end user would need to compile a custom kernel is when working with limited space or special hardware.

To increase your computer's performance you should consider using a lightweight GUI(like Xfce) and lightweight apps.

[pxi]

Not seen that one. A knockoff of Sco Unix?

Looking at the about page, it seems not. That was the conclusion I jumped to as well.