On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 12:31:28 UTC, Kiith-Sa wrote:
You click a "Additional Drivers" button, that will just pop up
as
a notification if you have an AMD or NVidia GPU. Then you click
at
the driver you want to install, and click "Activate". And maybe
"Ok"
or "Close" after that.That is the way it works both on Ubuntu
and on Mint.
It's not easy to miss.
Dunno, Driver manager (or something like that) showed me an empty
list saying I don't have proprietary drivers installed. Don't
know how to find prepackaged drivers. Missed it in both Mint and
Ubuntu.
You don't install the driver from NVidia's site - you have the
newest
driver prepackaged already.
In general, on Linux you don't install software by searching on
the net,
you use the package manager/software center GUI or do "apt-get
install program".
Well, the complicated thing is that my notebook is new and it has
latest hardware: support for GeForce GT 520MX was added to driver
285, but nvidia-current is 280. I don't know what this "support"
means; if vdpau will work with prepackaged driver, that's great.
That said, it is true that some Linux vendors have gone crazy
trying to "reinvent the GUI". Gnome3 and Unity (Ubuntu) are
both tabletized
(Win8 is also going in similar direction) and both much more
inefficient than Gnome2 was.
Wikipedia mentions that Ubuntu has an issue with high power
consumption. I'm not sure whether it's my problem, but they try
to address it in Ubuntu 12 using very nifty tricks like putting
USB controllers to low power mode and hunting down software with
frequent wakeups and filing bugs against them. They don't
consider GUI system as a culprit at all.
That said, KDE, which used to be bloated, has been optimizing
quite singificantly over the last few releases, and seem to
plan to continue doing it.
KDE however always comes with some useless "Social desktop"
features enabled
by default, which kill the performance (and make people think
KDE is still bloated - great PR, KDE!). Anyway, once that is
disabled, at least on my notebook Ubuntu/KDE is faster than
Win7.
XFCE is even faster, and is getting full-featured - it doesn't
have much
visual flair, though, if you want that.
I don't have performance issues, I have high CPU load in idle
mode. I'm currently on win7 and the cooler seems to be off, in
Ubuntu and Mint the cooler worked at high speed and quite warm
air was coming from the radiator.
From my experience, OpenSUSE is now both stable and friendly to
Windows power users. Ubuntu/Mint are more oriented towards
complete newbies
or people who only browse/use office suite.
The wubi option is quite amasing, I hesitate to go for
full-fledged dual-boot installation.
