Sunday, June 12

Life

Went Shopping Today

Survived.

Bought two keyboards, two mice, two HDMI cables, two USB cables, a four-port USB charger, a 16GB USB 3 thumb drive, a 16GB micro-SD card, and...  Wait, that's the lot.

Carted it all home and installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Tsumugi.  After close to twenty years of using RedHat releases (original RedHat, Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS), I thought I'd give it a try.  It has a pretty impressive feature list for what I want to do (ZFS, LXD, OpenStack, MAAS) and despite being a stable release (supported for 5 years) the packages are right up to date (Python 3.5, Ruby 2.3, PHP 7, MySQL 5.7).

Slight irks: The server install has no GUI.  Okay, it's a server install, fine.  The desktop install occupies 4GB and includes zero server components.  Not even MySQL, which is usually hard to avoid (and a pain when you're installing your own preferred release like Percona).  Oh, and DO NOT enable full-disk encryption when installing under VirtualBox.  It works, in theory, but it is verrrrrry slow.

Also, there's no real GUI package manager installed by default.  The desktop version seems to be very much the idiot edition, while the server version is the expert edition, leaving something of a gap.

Apart from that, it works, and it's usable and looks fine at 4K.  I was hoping that 4K screens would finally fix Linux's perennial problem with ugly fonts, and they do.  On both my 4K 15" notebook (Azusa) and my 4K 28" desktop screen (plugged into the notebook, hence the need for HDMI cables) it looks great.  4K at 15" is a crazy high resolution and almost everything looks good, but it's nice to have confirmation that the Linux desktop no longer looks like poop due to inadequate font hinting.

The problem with having a 4K 15" notebook is that I want to run it with two windows side-by-side the way I do with my desktop - generally my IDE on the right and terminal/email/web browser/Word on the left, depending on what I'm doing.  But while 4K is more than enough resolution for that, 15" just isn't big enough.  It drives an external 4K monitor with no problems, but that leaves little for its own 4K screen to do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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