Post #409,546
4/25/16 11:57:03 PM
4/25/16 11:57:03 PM
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I'm too old for this shit
I haven't fired up my Linux box for about a month. (The work laptop is lighter, faster, and has a nicer screen.) The last time I had it on I ran a dist-upgrade then shut it down.
I'm now an hour into troubleshooting why I've got no window manager, and I want to pitch it out the window.
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Post #409,547
4/26/16 2:49:23 AM
4/26/16 2:49:23 AM
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I know that song.
Apart from old laptops, that is, I have just two Linux boxes. And they haven't had an upgrade in months. One is my MythTV box which is running an now quite elderly version of Mythbuntu. The other is my EC2 instance in AWS running my email.
I gave up running a Linux desktop at home when I discovered Windows 8 was actually alright. Especially with a touchscreen.
I have a contractor colleague who is probably older than me who still farts around with VMs and database clusters at home in his spare time.
Wade.
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Post #409,554
4/26/16 9:24:42 AM
4/26/16 9:24:42 AM
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Yeap.
Only Linux I run is on VMs in the cloud, and this after spending at least a decade running it as my sole desktop.
I love getting into arguments with partisans now, as they're pretty quick with the "Mac fanboi, yer a luser" arguments. That's when I mention my box SLS diskettes.
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #409,555
4/26/16 10:00:55 AM
4/26/16 10:00:55 AM
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Me too.
Came to the conclusion a long time ago that if Linux wasn't ready for the desktop now, it never would be.
Wasn't wrong, as far as I can see.
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Post #409,570
4/26/16 7:31:20 PM
4/26/16 7:31:20 PM
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Meh
"Not ready for the desktop". What does that even mean? Its every detractor's favorite whine but it is never defined.
Beyond that, all (Windows, Mac and the Linux heavy DEs) suffer from the same disease these days: increasingly complex interdependencies and 0 documentation. If the standard is maintainability, none of these are suitable for the desktop.
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Post #409,574
4/26/16 10:00:26 PM
4/26/16 10:00:26 PM
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Too much configuration, not enough apps
I sit down in front of my Mac and I have Logic Pro, reasonable word processors (don't talk to me about OpenOffice, I used it for years and years. It's cack), and everything Just Works.
I got tired of substandard look-alikes, broken functionality, GNOME wars, slow VMs with lousy display layer emulation, recompiling the goddamn nVidia driver, and so on. Love it for development, but I don't have the time for it as a desktop. OSX has everything Linux had with the addition of a reasonable GUI and actual programs.
Now, it may have gotten better over the past few years (I doubt it), but I don't need it any more now that Homebrew handles my packaging needs on OSX.
You can hardly call me a whiny detractor. I lived with it for a long, long time and fought the good fight at several employers. I'm done.
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #409,582
4/27/16 9:32:19 AM
4/27/16 9:32:19 AM
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That's about the size of it.
Linux has none of the software I need. And, after the thick end of twenty-five years, I don't think it's ever going to get it.
I'm not a developer. I'm a photographer who likes to play games, and I make and share Word and other Office documents with people.
If Ubuntu etc. want my business, make an OS that has the apps that do those things. Please - let's not go down the GIMP/Darktable/OpenOffice route. Their real equivalents - PS/LR/MS Office - are so far ahead in all aspects (function, performance, usability) that it's just ridiculous.
Like Scott, I gave it a fair shake. In fact, I not only went all Linux for a couple or three years, at one point, I was all FreeBSD. Which is like Linux, but with even more ideological purity and even less useful functionality.
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Post #409,598
4/27/16 7:11:03 PM
4/27/16 7:11:03 PM
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That's about what I figured
Make it conditional on external actors, one of which has once sworn to drive it into the ground.
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Post #409,605
4/28/16 1:11:13 AM
4/28/16 1:11:13 AM
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Eh, no.
I don't use software based on ideology. Tried that, it sucked.
I use software based on a good match with my use case.
Linux doesn't have that, the apps that it has don't have that, so I don't use Linux.
My use case (games, photos) means Windows is the rational choice. If I didn't play games, I'd still have a Mac (I had 4 in a row, remember, and a couple of Mac laptops).
I have an iPhone, too! Double the antichrist for your money!
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Post #409,607
4/28/16 2:32:40 AM
4/28/16 2:32:40 AM
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It's great for trying options
Think I'll try photo editing. Yup, free app for that.
Now blogging. Plenty there.
Video production? Hmm ... a little spotty.
Book layout? Pretty high end! But damn, that's tedious. I think I'd rather let someone else do that part.
You know what? Forget the video, and the book layout. Photos and blogging, that's it. Now I just need to stay on LTS to avoid malware. And ... now it's broken.
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Post #409,608
4/28/16 6:02:04 AM
4/28/16 6:02:04 AM
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Speaking specifically to the photo angle
The apps are utter dogshit.
You know what's great about Photoshop? Workflow. As in, "it's sane". Yeah, there's a whole bunch of annoying bullshit that goes with Adobe products (mostly around licencing), but when you get to actually doing work, damn if they don't get you where you need to be.
Photoshop has a whole pile of tools that do amazing things (seriously: the content-aware healing tool is witchcraft) and they work together. The plugin ecosystem alone is worth the price of admission. And now that PS plugins work with Lightroom (which also integrates with PS), you got yourself a proper photo editing and organising system.
You know what's great about GIMP? The price, and that's about it. It's an image editing app designed by programmers, practicing cargo cult app design. "If we make a bunch of dialogues that sorta look like the ones in Photoshop, and we use the same vocabulary as Photoshop, then obviously our app will be usable and loved just like Photoshop, right?"
Heh, no.
Darktable is slow, buggy, and makes bad images. Its white balance tools are hopeless, which holes it before the waterline for all but the most trivial photo work and immediately puts it completely out of contention for professional work (example: you take a bunch of pictures of the inside of someone's house or an office; you need that blue folder on the desk and the whiteboard on the wall to be the same colour in all shots - well, you do if you want to get paid).
Outlook 2016 is simply irreplaceable for me. I need a good email experience integrated with a good calendar, and I don't want to do it in a browser. Everything that runs on Linux is either broken, unmaintained, or lacks features. Everything. Lightning, Evolution, KOrganiser, California, GNOME Calendar, etc. Outlook on the Mac ain't all that (disclaimer: I last used version 2011) but Mail is plenty good and the Apple Calendar is fine, too.
These are the kinds of real problems that need to be solved before Linux will go forward as a commonly-used platform. Being able to fix a broken graphics driver by working at the command line is great, but this is no more useful to most people than having to RRR in Windows - they can no more recover the system that way than they can juggle chainsaws.
In fact, it's by no means certain that just giving up and RRRing (esp. as installing Linux is easy these days) is any slower than locating and persuading a tame nerd to fix things. For folks who stash everything in the cloud, like my wife, it's a no-brainer. Nuke and pave, because life is short.
I totally understand and agree that Linux is a great platform for development. But that's not what I'm talking about.
I have burned hours and days and weeks just trying to get to the same place on Linux (and FreeBSD) that I am now in on Windows.
And you know what? I just want to take and process my photos, arrange my personal life and my Round Table, and play games. I don't want to be a computer janitor.
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Post #409,610
4/28/16 7:44:49 AM
4/28/16 7:44:49 AM
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My photo needs are lighter
I mostly use it for food photos, which I mostly take with good lighting. I mostly zoom, crop and sharpen, with a little white balance tweaking.
The times I've tried to color match two photos that were off for some reason ... Yeah, good luck.
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Post #409,611
4/28/16 8:05:32 AM
4/28/16 8:05:32 AM
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I feel ya
I dread to think how I would have managed to ensure that the bride's dress was the same perceptual shade of white in ~600 wedding photos (a not atypical number of frames to end up with on a paid wedding shoot) if I were using something like Darktable.
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Post #409,612
4/28/16 9:49:37 AM
4/28/16 9:49:37 AM
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I assume PS has something for that?
What I would want is to have a reference shot, then be able to pick a point on the reference and a point on a target shot and tell it, "Color balance so the target matches the reference."
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Post #409,615
4/28/16 10:30:28 AM
4/28/16 10:30:28 AM
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It looks like Nikon says you should fix it in the camera first.
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/article/fubpbfls/setting-white-balance.htmlI sympathize with you folks that have to edit hundreds of photos. It must be a royal pain. PS may continue to be the go-to tool for pros, but it's far too expensive for me, and the continual upgrade treadmill makes it even less appealing. I use PMView and Picasa for my very humble photo editing needs. PMView can be scripted, and Picasa's "I feel lucky" often does a pretty good job. FWIW. Cheers, Scott. (Who figures that Google is going to be the entity that continues to be the player that pushes "free" (or low-cost) software forward. Not one of the Linux houses.)
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Post #409,616
4/28/16 11:39:20 AM
4/28/16 11:39:20 AM
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You definitely start there
You can adjust for natural vs. fluorescent vs. incandescent lights and get pretty close. But when you're doing an album or a collage you can't judge shots stand-alone, but by how closely they match every other shot.
For mine, I do step-by-step tutorials. If the food changes color between shots, it's going to look like I'm assembling shots from multiple sessions. Which (just between you and me) I've actually done, but you wouldn't know because I did take the time to color match them.
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Post #409,623
4/28/16 2:02:44 PM
4/28/16 2:02:44 PM
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Nope
The whole point of shooting raw is that you don't have to faff about with that shit when you should be focusing* on composition.
Fiddle about with white balance, chimping like a bastard while you do it, literally hundreds of times on a wedding shoot?
fuck. that. shit.**
That said, my 6D does a pretty decent job of landing the right WB value the vast majority of the time. The ability to apply a consistent WB setting across multiple photos is what's gold. It doesn't have to be far off between shots to be noticeable.
And let's hear less of the "far too expensive". It's £8/month for PS and LR. I spend more than that on crisps at the pub. It's 4 litres of petrol. I bet your internet/tv/phone package is way more.
*see what I did thar?
**That article looks very much like it's aimed at people shooting JPEG. For very boring technical reasons, you can't change the WB on a JPEG like you can on a raw image.
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Post #409,627
4/28/16 4:57:12 PM
4/28/16 4:57:12 PM
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Interesting.
Thanks for the corrections. I've done very limited RAW picture-taking with my Canon G1X. I haven't seen the benefit yet (I'm not saying there isn't any!), and it does slow things down. I knew that RAW was a kinda-sorta pre-processed data file, but didn't know the details. Thanks. Just to amplify what you said: Photo.net: Steve Dunn , Mar 02, 2011; 02:54 p.m.
I'm coming at this from the Canon side of things, so I can't say with absolute certainty that this applies to all brands, but as far as I know it does.
If you're shooting RAW, your white balance setting doesn't affect the actual image data in the RAW file. It does affect the image displayed on the camera's LCD (which is a JPEG embedded within the RAW file for most Canon models, and probably similar for other brands). Since the embedded JPEG is what's typically used for any histograms and over/under-exposure warnings displayed by the camera, it affects those, too. So if you're using anything displayed on the camera to help you judge whether you got the shot right, then the white balance could be important in helping you make that judgment.
When you bring the RAW image into an image editor/RAW converter on your computer, the white balance you set in the camera should be irrelevant, with the possible exception that the software may use it as a default when it first presents the image (but then you can choose any WB you want, of course).
The same generally applies to other processing parameters that you can set in the camera, such as picture styles, sharpness, noise reduction*, and colour space. Shooting parameters (such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and any settings such as exposure compensation which affect the camera's choice of any of those parameters), of course, affect RAW images because aperture and shutter speed change the amount of light reaching the sensor and ISO affects the gain of the sensor's analog amplifiers.
I shoot RAW almost exclusively, and usually use auto WB in the camera. I also find it's close enough most of the time for the embedded JPEG and all the things the camera does with it, and then I can set whatever WB I want when I'm processing the images on my computer.
*: Many cameras have two completely separate types of noise reduction. I'm talking about the ordinary one that tries to reduce the noise seen in higher-ISO shots, with the unfortunate side-effect of blurring fine detail. Generally, that's not applied to RAW files. I'm not talking about long-exposure noise reduction, or dark frame subtraction, in which after a long exposure is completed, the camera closes the shutter, takes a second exposure of the same length, and then subtracts it from the original exposure, to get rid of things like thermal noise and hot pixels; that one, at least in Canon bodies, does affect the RAW file. The cheap CC is $10/month here. It's a lot for something that I might use once or twice a year (if that). We use the TV every day. ;-) But thanks for the reminder. $120/yr is a lot better than $500+ every couple of years or so. Cheers, Scott. (Who only has intentional exposure to Adobe software these days via its PDF stuff, and that has gotten to be about the most horrible way to fill out a simple form ever invented.)
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Post #409,622
4/28/16 1:54:28 PM
4/28/16 2:04:17 PM
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Re: I assume PS has something for that?
Not PS, LR.
You can set a white point and apply it to all your pictures.
ETA: More specifically, you can copy and paste adjustments (crop/rotate, colour, gradients, spot removals, etc. - basically anything you can do to an image in LR, you can C&P) from image to image (or images), and you can save them as presets, and stuff like that.
Edited by pwhysall
April 28, 2016, 02:04:17 PM EDT
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Post #409,667
4/29/16 5:41:50 PM
4/29/16 5:41:50 PM
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So, it is not ready for *your* desktop
That is perfectly fine. I have never said here or elsewhere that anyone should be using Linux come hell or high water.
It is the blanket not ready for *the* desktop I tend to take umbrage with as it completely discount the massive effort that has been put in to come up with what is now a quite functional alternative to most common tasks.
(And I do have an iPod 3G kicking around somewhere...)
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Post #409,668
4/29/16 5:51:08 PM
4/29/16 5:51:08 PM
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LibreOffice 5.1 is very good, also too.
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Post #409,675
4/29/16 6:55:44 PM
4/29/16 6:55:44 PM
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It is
Despite any preferential disputes about the menu organization, there are areas where it is much better than MS Office for regular work, especially on text documents. Style management and application is much more consistent and a lot easier to use. None of the make 'em up as we go along styles like Word.
If you need formulas, OO/LO are ahead by miles.
And, it is actually quite good at recovering MSO originated files that Word/Excel started puking on for whatever reason.
Base is no equivalent to Acccess, but then I've been doing my level best for the last 10 years to kill those databases off, so, no loss there >:-)
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Post #409,679
4/29/16 7:30:20 PM
4/29/16 7:30:20 PM
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I haven't used it in a while
Do they have a reasonable substitute for visio? I'm really only interested in flow charting and UML. I seem to remember they had a draw option that did ok. I don't recall if it had UML options. I'm doing database stuff now so I could use toys for that as well. Visio can do what I need. My home visio is an old msdn version (same as work version) and I don't know if it will survive the change to windows {whatever's in vogue when 7 collapses). I don't want to pay for another windows version of the same thing I already have to be independent of my work machine.
"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable." ~ AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)
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Post #409,680
4/29/16 8:45:29 PM
4/29/16 8:45:29 PM
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I have used Draw for various things, but not that.
Does this help? You love LibreOffice and OpenOffice, but you still use Visio to make drawings. Why? Because none of the shapes you need are easily available. Until now.
Custom OO Shapes is a repository of custom shapes you can use with LibreOffice and OpenOffice Draw. The following shapes are available:
[...]
UML Shapes Class, instance, package, component, assembly, collaboration, artifact, node, deployment, swim lanes (four variations), actor, accept event, action, activity final, decision, flow final, stop, initial node, parameter set, object node, condition, send signal, receive signal, frame, paths 24-Jan-2010 download (13.7 kb) HTH! Cheers, Scott.
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Post #409,686
4/30/16 5:54:34 AM
4/30/16 5:54:34 AM
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Looks like it might be useful.
I'll check it out when I get a decent linux box going at home. At work I have to use their setup and no other. Thanks!
"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable." ~ AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)
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Post #409,688
4/30/16 8:43:31 AM
4/30/16 8:43:31 AM
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Sounds good. Remember - LibreOffice runs on Winders and MacOS too.
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Post #409,738
5/2/16 7:10:12 PM
5/2/16 7:10:12 PM
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Never used the office suites for that
I've always used Diagram. It had working attachment points way back when. It still meets my needs so I have not looked for alternatives.
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Post #409,589
4/27/16 2:43:19 PM
4/27/16 2:43:19 PM
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True
We have a mix of RH/CentOS and Win7 at work. Desktop space is mostly windows and most operations/production is done on beefy (48-core, 256G class) RHEL servers. I got to choose between Win7 via thin client or a CentOS desktop. Chose the latter and can still connect to Win7 instance via Citrix VDI client. I work in a DoD classified env, so BYOD is out of the question.
Getting things to work properly in CentOS/Gnome (like Chrome, Citrix, Java, Eclipse..) was *way* more fiddly than it ought to be, and dependencies are still a huge problem, at least in yum/rpm-land - haven't run a Debian-based system in years now.
All Mac, all the time at home.
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Post #409,604
4/27/16 11:14:58 PM
4/27/16 11:14:58 PM
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That about sums it up.
Canonical had the opportunity to be safe, reliable and widespread. But they decided they wanted to be hip, interesting and cutting edge. :-/. I seriously began losing interest at that point.
Wade.
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Post #409,556
4/26/16 10:07:31 AM
4/26/16 10:07:31 AM
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I have one for experimention. Hane not booted it in a month
always look out for number one and don't step in number two
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Post #409,569
4/26/16 7:13:26 PM
4/26/16 7:13:26 PM
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Proprietary video drivers?
That's the one that keeps biting me on one of mine. I use the NVidia driver on the desktop machine. It needs to be recompiled on certain kernel upgrades and I usually forget.
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Post #409,571
4/26/16 7:31:35 PM
4/26/16 7:31:35 PM
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Dunno yet, going to spend some more time on it tonight
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Post #409,572
4/26/16 8:52:24 PM
4/26/16 8:52:24 PM
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Depending on the symptoms...
If it drops to a terminal login, I'd say something got mixed in the video drivers. The X server log should bear that out.
If the desktop launch misfires/hangs, moving the DE's hidden user profile directories out of the way may get things unstuck. (Looking at you, KDE...)
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Post #409,575
4/26/16 10:01:24 PM
4/26/16 10:01:24 PM
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"whining detractors" ;-)
This. I don't miss this at all. ;-)
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #409,597
4/27/16 7:03:37 PM
4/27/16 7:03:37 PM
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At least I can get it to work again
Get that blinky cursor in the left corner on Windows and its reformat/reinstall/reconfigure.
(Nothing more fun than installing an image only to find out the OEM has seen fit to release different graphics hardware under the same part number.)
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Post #409,599
4/27/16 7:34:15 PM
4/27/16 7:34:15 PM
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I don't use Windows. What's your point?
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #409,603
4/27/16 10:46:16 PM
4/27/16 10:46:16 PM
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That they all have warts
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Post #409,634
4/28/16 7:31:54 PM
4/28/16 7:31:54 PM
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From a desktop perspective, Linux has more than OSX in my experience
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #409,673
4/29/16 6:44:50 PM
4/29/16 6:44:50 PM
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As it so happens, I ended up getting a MacBook dropped in my lap last evening
The owner had taken it to the nearest Apple Store (about an hour one way) where they were told "So sorry. Snow Leopard is no longer supported and these will not run El Capitan. So..." [They're trying to keep a farm afloat. 2 x $1500 to replace hardware that is still perfectly suitable to their needs is not in the cards.]
Turns it was allergic to IP6 packets and their ISP had turned on IP6 on the inside without warning. The fix was to simply turn IP6 off in OSX but no chance in hell they were ever going to figure that out on their own. Apple also never backported any comprehensive fix to the network stack.
And Safari has gone lame. It doesn't crash but simply goes nowhere. That one remained a headscratcher. (Updating was a no go as Apple follows MS on this and locks Safari to the OS version?)
All said, the hardware is revision 6,1, which according to Apple will run El Cap. They may toss some extra RAM at it and give El Cap a shot.
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Post #409,676
4/29/16 7:03:13 PM
4/29/16 7:03:13 PM
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EveryMac has lots of good info.
MacBook 6,1(Note the MPB 6,1 is different, of course) The Core2Duo Mac laptops are very nice machines. J had a black one that was just a little too old to keep current. I had maxed out the RAM to 6 GB and installed a SSD, so it was plenty speedy. We finally got a 13" MBP a year or two ago to replace it. It doesn't really run any faster, and the screen is about the same, but it's "fully 64-bit" and can be updated, etc., etc. Good luck, and good of you to help out! Cheers, Scott.
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Post #409,581
4/27/16 7:51:27 AM
4/27/16 7:51:27 AM
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Already tried nuking the profiles, no luck
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Post #409,584
4/27/16 12:31:25 PM
4/27/16 12:31:25 PM
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I had a similar issue updating a machine a while ago.
I haven't tried to troubleshoot it. I'll probably just do a fresh install of Mint or Ubuntu or something, if I ever want to play with Linux on the metal again.
Lately I'm thinking that VMs are the way to go. The hardware's generally fast enough, and VirtualBox is generally good enough, that it seems like a workable solution.
I had my step mom set up on an iMac with a Win7 VM so she could run Quicken/win to do her church's books. It seemed to work well enough for the year or two that she did that (she's handed the job off to someone else now).
I'm still dreading the "upgrade" from Win7 to Win10... :-/
Cheers, Scott.
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Post #409,585
4/27/16 2:15:47 PM
4/27/16 2:15:47 PM
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Win 7 to Win 10.
It'll be fine, and it definitely is an upgrade. Your computer will go faster!
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Post #409,591
4/27/16 3:45:53 PM
4/27/16 3:45:53 PM
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Yeah, yeah. We'll see. ;-) (Thanks.)
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Post #410,127
5/15/16 11:03:56 PM
5/15/16 11:03:56 PM
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Got it running again. Lenovo Thinkpad T61.
It was running Mint 13 and X wouldn't start. I couldn't figure out enough about the error to fix it (the driver was Nvidia version 3xy.mumble but the kernel was for version 3za.mamble and the mismatch made it puke. I don't know how the mismatch happened.).
I burned a DVD for Ubuntu 16.04 but the system wouldn't boot from it for some reason (either from the internal DVD drive or from a USB DVD drive). Maybe there was something weird about the way the MacbookPro burned it or something...
I found the Mint 13 DVD and it booted perfectly and I did a fresh reinstall. Updated everything and started reinstalling various apps. I haven't installed the nVidia driver yet...
It's still a nice laptop (1650x1200 screen), but it's heavy and probably can't last more than a couple of hours not being plugged in.
Cheers, Scott.
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Post #410,128
5/16/16 4:46:51 AM
5/16/16 4:46:51 AM
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Battery life? What's that?
I don't think mine was ever good for more than an hour-and-a-half when new. Now it's probably good for a half-hour.
And replacement batteries are half the cost of a new laptop.
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Post #410,008
5/10/16 7:15:20 PM
5/10/16 7:15:20 PM
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Success
I decided I needed to just do a reinstall. First step I'd have to put my /home on a new partition. Didn't have enough free space, so I started backing up all my pics to Google Photos. Figured I'd back it up, delete local, create the partition, reinstall, then copy it all back local.
Finally finished copying everything and rebooted to do the install, and didn't have the thumb drive in. Fine, let it boot up and see what happens. Hmm ... still no window manager, but I get a popup prompting me to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.4. Sure, why not? I was about to install it anyway.
And it works. I swear I upgraded already from the command line, but this time it worked.
I'm still too old for this shit ... plus 15 days.
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Post #410,011
5/10/16 7:58:27 PM
5/10/16 7:58:27 PM
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:-) Woot!
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Post #418,288
5/23/17 6:41:08 AM
5/23/17 6:41:08 AM
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You, me, and Danny Glover.
Mel Gibson too, in the last one, IIRC. Dunno how many spotted that, but I found it hilarious.
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