[cpd2009]

It's because unlike commercial OSes, hobbyist programmers typically don't have the burden of companies having to decide whether this or that particular piece of hardware is worth the added support costs.

For companies like Wacom, Apple, MS, etc, It's all about maximizing profits, so whenever a product gets "obsolete" even after five years, they push customers to upgrade by discontinuing support.

Oh yeah... pressure sensitivity on my Graphire 4 works well in Linux. Now I just need to rebuild my rusty drawing skills. I may start out on paper as a sketch as practice, and then scan it and draw it into digital form like most illustrators.

Then again, I could try Inkscape, which uses vector graphics....

[cpd2009]

I'm going to try an experiment with Pearl tonight. In the nearly three years I've used this rig, I've never used the built in Intel HD Graphics 530. It's a step down from a 750Ti, but due to changes in how I use my PC, I'm curious as to how well the integrated graphics do with my video tasks. I'm also coming across visual glitches in KDE Plasma 5 with it's Oxygen window decorations I use. These glitches happen when you resize windows, resulting in parts of the background windows flickering into black. This didn't happen with Breeze or other themes I've used.

It should be easy to test this out. I'd have to connect the monitor to the HDMI port (using an HDMI-to-DVI converter), switch off the PCIe GPU in the BIOS, and reconfigure the X11 driver in Mageia. If this setup works good enough, I may end up saving the 750Ti for my mom's PC build so her solitarie and mahjongg games can run well.

[cpd2009]

Getting the drivers switched was easy enough. But KDE won't start now. I tried Googling for a solution, but no dice.

I'm going to have to reinstall.

[huckleberrypie]

Been there, done that, and it's a pain. Makes me wonder if you considered using a disk imaging tool and do an image backup of things prior to something drastic.

[cpd2009]

Been there, done that, and it's a pain. Makes me wonder if you considered using a disk imaging tool and do an image backup of things prior to something drastic.

Not really. My current mode of backup and restore in such situations is to boot Puppy Linux and copy my documents to Pearl's second hard drive, reinstall the OS, and move the files back to the main drive after everything is done. It's cumbersome, but it's doable.

I have my digital photos, my animation screencap collections, and music/documents, which take up quite a lot of space. I've considered archiving my older digital photos onto DVD-R discs to free up some more space. I'd need a very large secondary partition for such cloning software to work because of all that data.

I will say this though. Getting a Linux distro back up and running takes far less time than with Windows. You don't need to download as many updates as Windows, and a lot of hardware drivers are already built in.

[cpd2009]

Man, I feel stupid and annoyed. Turns out there was a folder full of converted videos I had ready to upload to Youtube along with some others that I forgot the names of. I forgot to copy those over before reinstallation and now those videos are lost.

That means I have to reconvert those videos from VHS all over again, which can take several days just for a few tapes.

[huckleberrypie]

Man, I feel stupid and annoyed. Turns out there was a folder full of converted videos I had ready to upload to Youtube along with some others that I forgot the names of. I forgot to copy those over before reinstallation and now those videos are lost.

That means I have to reconvert those videos from VHS all over again, which can take several days just for a few tapes.

Sorry about that mate. Been through those as well, and it is truly annoying to deal with data loss and/or corruption especially if your folks are reining down on your necks for a project that happens to be on that affected storage medium.

[cpd2009]

I will say this though... at least my Linux issues were a combination of user error and buggy Nvidia drivers. I had to delete a libGL.so symlink to get my video capture programs to run properly with the proprietary Nvidia drivers. Apparently that symlink wasn't restored when I switched back to the Nouveau driver before shutting down and removing the card. Even when I was able to get the Intel drivers set up, KDE would no longer start because of said libGL error. 

Good news is that after switching to the Intel HD Graphics 530, the desktop compositor works a lot smoother and doesn't suffer from rendering glitches. There is also no screen tearing which was a minor annoyance with the Nvidia drivers. Video playback also appears to be great. Too bad no Linux web browser natively supports Nvidia VDPAU or Intel VA-API acceleration yet, even Firefox.

I'd imagine my causal games will work just fine even with Wine. Linux games work great as expected. I tested Extreme Tux Racer and framerate was smooth, but then again, that game looks like it could have been a PS1 release.

As for Pearl's system RAM, the Intel graphics don't take away much of it. KSysGuard (task manager and monitoring tool) reports 15.6GB RAM total which is still plenty for a Linux system.

---

One more thing... I notice every now and then that my forum posts end up with random  symbols at the end of paragraphs. I left one at the end of the first paragraph to illustrate this forum bug.

[cpd2009]

Perhaps the best commercial for an SSD ever made?

[huckleberrypie]

Perhaps the best commercial for an SSD ever made?

inb4 people making memes out of this, e.g. a different message sent by the aliens. :V