And now, for something geeky....

[malada]

I like to take old computers and fix them up... mostly for fun. I obtained a laptop (waves at MM) with reasonable hardware and Windows 10 (unactivated) that I've been playing with and installed a viewer for Second Life on it.

And it failed to run because the video drivers were out of date. No drivers were available for Windows 10. The generic drives work for most applications though.

I found this strange since I've installed Second Life programs on far less beefy systems without an issue. Of course those machines were running Linux....

So I downloaded the latest edition of XUbuntu (my favorite flavor of Linux) and turned the laptop into a dual boot machine. And what do you know? The Second Life viewer installed without a hitch in the Xubuntu side of things. And it installed *faster* too.

Chalk up another win for Linux.

-m

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I've found that's usually the case too. BTW, there's a new distro here based on Ubuntu which has a bunch of somewhat useful tools for hardware diagnostics baked in.

[malada]

I've settled into Xubuntu because of the simplicity and speed of XFCE.

That said - since I do some multi media work - I'm playing around (again) with Ubuntu Studio. I've tried it before and found it cranky but it seems to be working well.

But hey, more distros mean more choices and choice is good.

-m

[siliconshaman]

same here, Xubuntu for laptops, Mint for desktops here.. xfce on both set-ups. Because it minimises the amount of faffing around I have to do.

and then there's my daughters rig, which is Windows 10 because it's her gaming machine and game devs still think computers only come in Windows and Macs.

If someone comes up with a linux distro that'll run windows programs natively without wine or a VM I'll be very, very happy.

[marahmarie]

*waves back*

Glad to hear you got it working. Gosh, haven't been on Second Life in...maybe 10 years, myself? Those were the days.

[malada]

SL is still fun when it isn't broken. It's not badly broken but simple things still get fluffed up.

And I kept Windows 10 on it just remind myself how entirely fluffed up Windows has become.

-m