Desktop OS: To be or not to be...

[Mark]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Smokin Chevy <chevy4x4burb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that there is some confusion here.  These are not high end video
> cards.  They were middle of the road cards two years ago.  This is not a
> gamer rig.  The SLI bridge is not installed.
>
A-ha!  There's your problem right there.

No, seriously, that's a fair point.

> I did not know that using more then two monitors was that unusual.  I know a
> few people who do and I personally have for many years.  I would have
> thought that Linux would have come up to speed on that by now.
>
I usually have two monitors at work (where I don't have to pay for
them) but it's been almost two years since that happened for me.
Beyond that, most of the people I know who use computers, even who use
them a lot, only have a single monitor.  Dual monitors are probably
not *too* unusual, but more than two - yeah, that's beyond the norm.

> I have tried downloading the 260 driver directly from nvidia with the same
> result.
>
Have you tried asking nvidia about that?  Even if your cards are a
little old, it seems like they might be willing to help with this.
Mine's a 7200GS (got it wrong before) that I had to get on emergency
purpose when my 7100GS just died, about a year and a half ago - low
end but it works just fine for me.

> I will swear by Ubuntu Server for my servers but the Desktop Edition does
> not seem ready except for simple desktops.  Now these limitations are
> pertaining to Linux, Xorg, and so on.  I just pick on Ubuntu because they
> are the closest of the distros that I am aware of to being mainstream
> desktop ready.
>
Can't really argue with that last point.  :-)

I suppose if you're going to pick on a distro, Ubuntu is the right
choice - it is reputed to be the most popular, and coming from CentOS
I can see why, although for long term reliability and stability from a
business standpoint, I'd be hard pressed to recommend other than
RHEL/CentOS, largely from lack of other field experience.  My last job
they ran the app on FC1 and one of the things I was supposed to do was
help migrate to CentOS 5, but politics and money prevented that from
happening.  Before that I was using CentOS 4  as an experimental "new"
base (from SuSE 10.2, then probably SLES).

Most of the non business users I know swear by Ubuntu, so I'm guessing
that they don't push the limits of the systems as much as it seems you
do.

IOW, you have a good point and I retract most of my prior comments
(but not the four monitors being unusual part... :-).

For myself, I have found that U10.10 is flexible enough for everything
I need, from producing documents, fooling around with sound, running
multiple  browsers, having  Win XP VM and playing (and playing with)
graphics, audio and video files.  But I have a mere single monitor,
large though it be, and a simple Athlon II X4 CPU on a cheapo ECS m/b
with only 4GB of memory, 1.7TB of disk, and a great sound system from
at least twenty years ago that still kicks ass.  My needs are
relatively modest.  :-)

Mark