Linux

[Mike Henderson]

I'm late to the game, but I got the bug to learn more about Linux recently and have been working with it over the last month or so. I'm interested in it as a workstation and not as a server, so I'm more interested in a good GUI than the command line interface.

I have an older i3 computer (about 2010) with an SSD and I put both Ububtu and Mint on it - two partitions so I can choose which to go to at boot time. Some comments:

1. Linux is pretty good. It's easy to use and seems to be reliable (haven't used it that hard yet).

2. Some people say that you can run Linux on a less powerful computer than Windows. My experience is that they run similar. Linux with a HDD (instead of an SSD) is slooooow. I put in an HDD when I started because I wanted to keep Windows on my SSD in case I wanted to go back.

3. The difference between Ubuntu and Mint is mostly in the GUI. It seems that Mint is oriented towards the Windows user - the GUI seems to follow many of the Windows conventions. But either is good. Mint uses Ubuntu as its base.

4. There's a learning curve to be able to use either Linux easily.

5. It's a good choice if you have a computer without an operating system and don't want to spring for the cost of Windows (about $120). Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice which is generally compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint and that can save you from having to buy MS Office.

I know there are other people on the forum that use Linux. What are your comments?

Mike

[Oh, and Thunderbird and Lightning are a good email client and calendar.]

[William Adams]

I'd use Linux more if I could --- the problem is I prefer pen computers, and I mislike the limitations of Cellwriter, the combed handwriting input method which is as good as it gets in Linux (unless one uses a hack which allows one to use Vista's HWR).

Probably my next machine will be an Android tablet --- the Lenovo Yoga Book is interesting, and if they'd just allow the active stylus to be used on the display, I'd've bought one by now.

[glenn bradley]

At work we are OS agnostic. I just resurrected an old laptop that was literally acting as a bookend. 384meg of RAM and it runs the lightweight Lubuntu just fine. I've set it up to boot straight into Pandora or straight into Audacious to play whatever media I have plugged into the USB. this has become my shop 'radio' for zero cost and about an hours effort. I feel a bit for the Linux-bigots at work. Over the years the balance has shifted to where I now have to restart and fiddle with my linux services the way I used to have to restart Windoze. On the other hand, you can't even load Windows on a small system that will run Linux just fine. Long dead hardware lives again ;-)

[paul cottingham]

I have comments, but I will let others chime in first. I will say that it should not be slow, especially compared to Windows. I wonder if you need to look at the driver you have loaded for the display card (it's more complex than that, but you get my drift.)

[Mike Henderson]

I have comments, but I will let others chime in first. I will say that it should not be slow, especially compared to Windows. I wonder if you need to look at the driver you have loaded for the display card (it's more complex than that, but you get my drift.)
The slow performance was all due to the use of an HDD instead of an SSD. Once I moved everything over to an SSD, performance was much better. That's true for both Linux and Windows. And an i3 seems to be plenty for both Linux and Windows 10.

My main computer is an i7 and except for certain operations the performance is about what the i3 gave because a lot of things are bound by disk speed or Internet access. But for those things that are CPU bound, the i7 flies.

Mike

[paul cottingham]

The slow performance was all due to the use of an HDD instead of an SSD. Once I moved everything over to an SSD, performance was much better. That's true for both Linux and Windows. And an i3 seems to be plenty for both Linux and Windows 10.

My main computer is an i7 and except for certain operations the performance is about what the i3 gave because a lot of things are bound by disk speed or Internet access. But for those things that are CPU bound, the i7 flies.

Mike
Sorry, the way I read that (and my brain injury is acting up) I thought you meant your performance was only acting up in Linux.

Glad you resolved it.

[paul cottingham]

At work we are OS agnostic. I just resurrected an old laptop that was literally acting as a bookend. 384meg of RAM and it runs the lightweight Lubuntu just fine. I've set it up to boot straight into Pandora or straight into Audacious to play whatever media I have plugged into the USB. this has become my shop 'radio' for zero cost and about an hours effort. I feel a bit for the Linux-bigots at work. Over the years the balance has shifted to where I now have to restart and fiddle with my linux services the way I used to have to restart Windoze. On the other hand, you can't even load Windows on a small system that will run Linux just fine. Long dead hardware lives again ;-)

Hmmm. "Linux bigots."

I run into far more windows and Mac bigots, to be clear, (my a Huge margin) even though I have an admitted preference for Linux. We don't even have anything running Linux at home right now, but we do have a Mac. Next box I get running will be running Linux so I can run a media server on it. Plex baby! And no viruses.

[Art Mann]

My information is a few years old and perhaps not too appropriate for your application but here it is anyway. While I was working at an ultra high volume automotive electronics plant, we decided to install a line monitoring system based on bar codes and proximity switches. The core of the system was a set of networked strategically placed PCs. We started with Windows NT but quickly abandoned it due to its lack of any real time multitasking capability and general software unreliability. We replaced the whole system with Linux (Red Hat, if I remember correctly) and the system became highly useful and very reliable. Subsequently, it was adapted for certain PC driven automated test systems. It was a huge improvement in reliability and raw performance while being much, much less demanding of computer resources.

[Eric Keller]

if you use linux on an ssd, you should put a lot of things on ramdisk. I haven't messed around with putting logs on ramdisk, but there is a script for some other heavy files that get written to a lot. This comes with debian and ubuntu and derivatives, not sure about other distributions:
sudo cp /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount

[Mike Henderson]

if you use linux on an ssd, you should put a lot of things on ramdisk. I haven't messed around with putting logs on ramdisk, but there is a script for some other heavy files that get written to a lot. This comes with debian and ubuntu and derivatives, not sure about other distributions:
sudo cp /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount
I appreciate your comment but have a question: Why use a RAMdisk since the SSD is so fast? I can understand using a RAMdisk if you used an HDD because the HDD is pretty slow. But a SSD is pretty fast and both Linux and Windows perform well with an SSD.

I'll experiment with the RAMdisk but I'm pretty happy with the performance with an SSD.

Mike

[paul cottingham]

Because they are different, and treated differently by the OS. I can't really explain it (not a developer) from a programming point of view, nor from a OS point of view (been too long, darn head injury, and I may be wrong!) but I'm pretty sure they are treated differently.

I seem to recall when we set these up, (but it was a different context, diskless workstations) it made a difference.

[Curt Harms]

I appreciate your comment but have a question: Why use a RAMdisk since the SSD is so fast? I can understand using a RAMdisk if you used an HDD because the HDD is pretty slow. But a SSD is pretty fast and both Linux and Windows perform well with an SSD.

I'll experiment with the RAMdisk but I'm pretty happy with the performance with an SSD.

Mike

I think the concern is about flash cell wear when used as swap partition. A Ram disk may reduce writes to the SSD and dram doesn't wear when being written to. Personally, most of my installs don't even have a swap partition. A machine with < 4 GB RAM should probably have some swap and AFAIK you need a swap partition if you want to use hibernation. Given that hibernation doesn't have a good reputation, I don't bother. If I figure I need swap space (The Windows equivalent is page file I think) I create a swap file instead. In fact I think Ubuntu is planning to go with a swap file over swap partition by default in 17.04. That saves a partition.

If you want to get an idea how many resources are being used there's a lightweight app that runs in a terminal called htop. It lists load/processor core, RAM in use and swap in use. I seldom see swap being used, or at most a few MB. You can also use htop to kill misbehaving applications.

[Mike Henderson]

I understand your comment about avoiding flash cell wear when using a RAMdisk. And thanks for the pointer to htop. I installed it and it looks interesting and useful. No swap usage on my system.
I read the test results (independent) of the Samsung 850 EVO SSD's a while back. I don't remember all the details but the net (going from memory) is that the flash cells will last longer than your lifetime if you hammered them 24 hours a day. And for a workstation that's only used a few hours a day, there's essentially no chance that you'll exceed the write capability of the flash. And this was for the regular 850, not the 850 PRO.

I use Samsung SSD's in my computers, including the Linux one. Earlier I had used Crucial, but Samsung provides better software to clone an existing drive.

Since I read that study, I quit worrying about flash cell wear.

I'm going to go see if I can find that study again. If I can, I'll post a link here. But remember that I'm going from memory so we'll see exactly what the study says.

Mike

[Here's one (http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead). Not the one I remember that evaluated the 850, but still instructive. I'll keep looking.]
[Here's another (http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2936416/long-samsung-evo-850-ssd.html). Again, not the one I was looking for.]

[Eric Keller]

I'm sure they are getting better, but it seems to me that it's really trivial to implement swap in ramdisk, and I see no reason to take risks on my system. I expect a lot of the load-leveling on ssd's is not done with linux in mind.

[Ryan Mooney]

I'm sure they are getting better, but it seems to me that it's really trivial to implement swap in ramdisk, and I see no reason to take risks on my system. I expect a lot of the load-leveling on ssd's is not done with linux in mind.

Swap on a ramdisk is non-sequitur. Swap is by definition a place to take things out of ram to make more room in ram when there is memory pressure. Swapping back to a ramdisk just adds overhead and leaves you with less ram.

[Tom Stenzel]

I've mentioned before I run Point Linux on my old XP box with a Athlon XP processor. Debian Jessie with the Mate (pronouched mah-tay) interface. With 1 gig of ram I have a 5 gig swap partition, a decent chunk out of a 40 gig disk. Still I haven't had much problem with space. On my box Linux takes longer to boot than XP did but once running it lopes along OK.

The best way to find out if Linux will work for you is to try the Windows versions of applications like Libreoffice, Gimp, Audacity, Gnucash, Emacs for the masochist in you, and the like. If those work for you in Windows moving to Linux will be pretty painless.

I haven't tried running any heroics to get Windows apps going like using Wine. I kept a hard drive with XP on it and used it at tax time. The machine is off the net (an axe through the coax as I call it) while this goes on. Now I have a Toshiba laptop with Win 8.1 I bought off my daughter so it might become the tax machine. Other than tax software I haven't needed to use Windows, the apps I have on the laptop mirror what is on the Linux box.

Applications still rule. Linux is a fine OS but if you can't get software on it to do what you need then it isn't for you.

-Tom

[Mike Henderson]

I agree with Tom that applications are critical. I haven't really tried LibreOffice applications yet but I did try Gimp and it's really good as a photo editor. I've been using Photoshop Elements on my Windows machine and it looks like Gimp will do essentially the same things as Photoshop Elements. But I haven't worked Gimp hard yet. Like all applications, it takes time to really know the ins and outs of the program so that you can do your work quickly.

What has surprised me is how good some of the common applications are - mail, calendar, and Gimp so far - but I'm still exploring.

Mike

[Bill McNiel]

I have understood absolutely nothing in this thread. I tend to hang with pencils, paper and wood.

Merry Christmas all - Bill