Wednesday 12 April 2017

A FAILED UNITY

Well ... this one is a surprise.

The firm Canonical has announced its ending it's work on the Unity project. Unity was basically a GUI, Graphical User Interface, for Ubuntu what is an Operating System which is built on Linux ... which is kinda ... a version, free one, of Unix.

Confused?

Yeah well that's probably why it failed.

And did I say I was surprised?

Yeah, I was only surprised by the fact this was reported on in the BBC News app!

I had a little try of Unity and Ubuntu on a laptop and I was not impressed. It was also overheating my laptop which was shutting itself down.

I ... published an article or piece somewhere criticising Unity and Ubuntu and basically got rid my some idiot fanboys that I was a newbie and did not know what I was talking about.

Funny then that we fast a forward a few years and not only is there this announcement that its ending, in part, but that there is also a mention of difficulties with laptops.

Funny, no one who criticised me mentioned that there was a long running issue getting it to work on laptops.

I was criticised for trying to run it on an AMD Radeon as apparently they didn't work so well as they did not have an open system when it cage to drivers. I stated that this only made things even worse! I pointed out that there are not one but TWO companies producing graphics cards and that you would think that was something with warning people about?!

No ... all I heard and read was how fantastic the OS was, easy to install and worked great. Umm ... no.

What my critics failed to know, as is often the case with fanboys in anything that are obviously brain dead, is that I have a BSc Single Honours Degree in Applied Computing.

They also failed to realise I'm somewhat older than your average teenager by more years than I care to admit.

But what this does mean is I had a Binatone Pong gaming system, Atari 2600, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore Amiga and my first PC was a Pentium 2.

I also built one of the first SLI rigs with an Athlon64 and two Before 6800GT's. Or was it 8800? I forget. It was around a month or so before CustomPC did an article on it and his difficult it was. 

Umm ... no it wasn't. Well ... except for the fact it didn't occur to me that I had to install the GPU driver twice!!

No, nor did they know that I set up my PC to dual boot with various operating systems which included Linux RedHat 4.5, I think it was, back around 1998. Now that was a pain in the arse. Considering attending lectures and assignments to complete it took me two days to get it working. One lecturer I was friendly with said I would not get it working. The look on his face when I told him that I had got Windows and RedHat dual booting but that it did take two days.

One again, like the damned SLI setup it never occurred to me they might use different file formats and to achieve this you had to use specific partitions a certain way and think about the boot sector.
Yeah but if you've played around with something for five minutes you get the right to accuse everyone else of being thick newbies if you don't praise the thing you love.

Hey?! At least in this case it's something that is free they have not paid through the nose for.
The reason I tried it again is like I said with RedHat all those years ago, Linux needs to go a long way before it will become relevant. That was because back then they said it would overtake Windows eventually. "Not anytime soon out won't" I said to this remark.

The funny thing is I see people saying that when I run down the operating system.

On the one hand they said it was better than Windows and would overtake it in its market share.
But they also said it was an operating system for people who liked to 'tinker'. Errr no.

Those two things don't go together and of you just want to get things done you can't have something you need to keep buggering about with.

It also needs to be bloody intuitive for it to ever come close to the number of installs Windows has.
The funny thing is something else that also runs on a Unix, is it actually Linux as I forget, core gets launched and does overtake Windows to boot ...

Android.

Boy I would have hated being Mark Shuttlecock or worse still, anyone who had been working on Linux for like well over ten years. To watch Android just get launched and then rocket upwards.
Funny thing is I'm not a fan of Android either and it seems to have developed faults and bad habits as it is supposed to get better.

I really wouldn't want an Android desktop computer! Nor, even, a laptop.

Maybe one day someone might actually being out a version of Linux where I know I could give up Windows entirely?


I just hope that wait is not as long as my last one from RedHat 4.5 to Ubuntu 14.6, I think it was, Pangolin ... that one?
Maybe if Canonical had just concentrated on desktops and laptops we might have already gotten one?
Oddly I never liked the look of many of the other Linux distros, Mint probably being about the best outside of Unity.

I might build a PC to run Linux on later this year and I'll look into the GUI's then to see what's on offer.

I guess I can stop searching for that Ubuntu Phone now?

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it: Ubuntu ends Unity software unification project - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39490848

Tuesday 4 April 2017

THE PLOT THICKENS .. THEN TWISTS AND TURNS

Well .. it seems that since its launch the number of videos about AMD's Ryzen CPU, which was crazy before launch, ,has actually increased in frequency.

I guess I should have seen that coming with new technology, architecture and lithography?!

However it has actually had more subjects attached to it than even I could have dreamed up. I was also encouraged to make this video after, not one but, two new subject areas concerning Ryzen cropped up.

First off was an extremely interesting rumour that stated that part of the issue of Ryzen's performance, though it was not an issue in my mind, had something to do with nVidia cards and more precisely nVidia's driver. Despite my complete lack of concern about performance in existing games, being a new architecture and NOT optimised for in any way, this particular issue is a problem. Because it will affect the performance of future games if not addressed.

Now this makes things quite interesting and what should take place is that when AMD's Vega becomes available the performance should increase. Well unless nVidia resolves the driver issue in the meantime.

Of course this problem was compounded by the lack of a high end graphics card from AMD which is why everyone will have to wait until either AMD RX Vega is launched or nVidia fixes their drivers, whichever comes first. As nVidia would now realise that they will lose a shed tonne of sales for everyone buying Ryzen I would imagine they will fix the issue pretty quick.

From now on, those that do theiur research like me and many others, everyone that is about to or planning a Ryzen build, like me, will either buy an AMD RX 480 and then an RX Vega when launched. Or they could purchase two RX 480's or wait a few days for the RX 580 and buy one or two of those or wait until May and just get the RX Vega.

As for the sudden jump from RX 480 to RX 580 .. I am not sure I agree with that AMD. I am not sure because .. well the RX 580 has not been out or its performance fully tested and out there in the wild. Yet.

The RX 580 is reported to be a refined Polaris chip so an improved RX 480. What I find, as do many others, odd about this is .. how much of a refinement and improvement did they get to justify calling it an RX 580? For me it would have to be damn close to the nVidia Geforce 1070 to be called an RX 480. I mean after all, leaving aside models ending in 'X' which was obviously never going to happen, you still have the '590' as well as 'Vega'.

In other words now announcing the RX 580 suggests to me that the RX 590 and the RX VEGA would be better than the Geforce 1070 and 1080 respectively...and are there not two Vegas coming out? So if the RX 590 is a cut down Vega I am wondering if there will be a huge gap in performance between the RX 580 and the RX 590? Bit weird.

The other thing that has cropped up is the re-emergence of the Ryzen Pro name. In that recent post I did with the leaked list of a head spinning 17 models of Ryzen I first called the list a pile of crap. But then later I gave it some thought and realised that the chances are that the Ryzen Pro models with be mobile parts.

Well the name has cropped back up and I still believe they will be mobile parts. I mean the desktop line up looks pretty tied up to me and introducing more models will just make everything confusing to many.

Blimey. This comes literally mere days after something no one expected with the leak and now almost confirmed rumour that AMD plans on doing a high end desktop platform, HEDT, and planning a 16 core processor followed by a leak of a 12 core processor!

Bloody hell. Along with improvements to be made we did expect, plus one that evaporated with Windows scheduling, plus some we did not expect, nVidia driver, faster RAM improving performance and now with these two Ryzen rumours and launches Ryzen is going to be talked about for a fair old while yet.

AMD has managed to raise the talk about Ryzen pre-launch and still managing to do this post launch in a way that, in my memory, has been better than anything they did in the past. Maybe this was part of their planned marketing strategy? If so ... well they are now looking to have outdone themselves here?

A common complaint among tech enthusiasts is AMD's marketing and claiming that their difficulty is most people do know Intel but do not know AMD. Well Ryzen has been heavily talked about for the last year or two that has increased to a peak lately and likely to stay in that peak for at least one year?

In other words recently almost all everyone has talked about it Ryzen and we cannot predict precisely when it will end. Now considering that there is also the Ryzen based APU's yet to come, the launches of the Pro models and these 12 and 16 core models over the next 6 months or so I would imagine that before everyone has even stopped talking about that engineering samples of the next Zen core will be doing the rounds and it may well continue on?

Hence why I said 'at least one year'.

I was planning to build a new rig based on Ryzen and Vega at the end of May or sometime in June but now I am like 'Oooh wait a minute ... 12 cores? Maybe I should wait and see the benchmarks on that?!' Lol. Well you have the final clock frequencies to consider as well as improvements and optimisations between now and then?

To those that said that 2017 was going to be a great year for PC tech mostly said it just about the launch of the known Ryzen CPUs, Vega GPUs and nVidia's 1080Ti.

Now I am wondering how many are sitting at their monitors frozen in place with their eyes wide and their chins resting on the floor with a pool of dribble gradually increasing its radius? Lol.

You do know water and electronics don't mix, right? Lol.

We do not know, fully at any rate, exactly what nVidia and Intel is going to do, launch or indeed leak this year either!