I have been using Linux for a long time, and it seems like every time I try to watch a DVD, it's a fresh round of hacking for 30 minutes before I can get it to work.
I just recently built a new workstation, including a Blu-Ray/DVD/CD burner. After seeing the recent announcement here about Handbrake, I grabbed the closest DVD, fired up VLC, watched the first few minutes of it, and shortly afterwards I had ripped and encoded one of the episodes to a file I can watch on my Roku.
The only hacking I did was to install libdvd-pkg or something like that.
Say hello to DRM. Best i recall they introduced a updated DRM system for BR some years after launch, and to play those discs one need to either firmware update or replace the player.
Never mind that the BR spec has all kinds of weirdness, including things like bundled Java applets(?!).
All in all, its problems like these that keeps us torrenting.
I haven't really used the drive other than what I mentioned. I just grabbed the nearest DVD (disc 2 of 3 of season 7 of "The Big Bang Theory"), popped it in, and it just worked.
That was just a quick "test" to see how difficult it was nowadays to rip/encode DVDs (I haven't done that for probably eight years or so and it was a major PITA back then). I was planning on doing the same to most of our "media collection" so I'm hoping it continues to go well.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be looking more into this.
Not as a comparison to apple. You want osx you buy the hardware they specify. Buy a laptop known to work out of the box with linux and it works out of the box with linux. Try it on any random laptop, ymmv. Not many of them work as badly as non-apple blessed machines with osx. It's pretty rare I can't get something useful out of any old laptop with a linux install. Is hackintosh still even a thing?
I have a hackintosh as my main computer. It works ok. Graphics drivers are sometimes a pain/ buggy. iMessages doesn't work unless you want to do a lot of work.
However it is faster/more expandable than most macs available today.
Hackintosh is still very much a thing. I had a great 10.5 desktop with Kalyway years ago. I recently tried to get Yosemite or something working with a Core-i5 Sandy Bridge PC and it did not go well due to graphics drivers.
I keep hearing this, but I've never had an issue (Arch, Macbook Air 2013).
On the contrary, I have endless problems in macOS with WiFi where some networks won't work if I don't specify a DNS (I use Google's, but I assume that doesn't make a difference) - and others won't work if I do! (Meanwhile, other devices are fine doing the opposite.)
I have a TP-Link Archer USB 802.11ac Wifi USB stick. It definitely does not work out of the box. You have to get and compile some driver from GitHub using dkms. After some stable Ubuntu updates Wifi just stopped working.
You need to check the chipset before you buy. Intel and Atheros have a good reputation for Linux support. Broadcom does not. I heard broadcom is leaving the wifi market soon. If so, this should get better in short order.
The thesis was that Wifi is simply not a problem anymore on Linux, which is false. Wifi is not a problem if you pick the right chipset. However, this has always been true. I was using Wifi without a problem more than a decade ago, when Intersil Prism (Orinico) was very well supported on Linux and BSD.
But it's currently not the case that you can take an arbitrary Windows or Apple machine, install Linux and have a working Wifi. It's very much hit and miss.
FYI: the TP-Link Archer that I mentioned uses a Realtek chipset. It does not work out of the box. You have to get an untrusted driver from GitHub, compile it with DKMS. Breaks with stable Ubuntu updates. The driver also seems to be quite flakey, regularly losing connection to the AP.
I really don't understand why there isn't a niche company that does nothing but make high quality peripherals that work in Linux. I just bought an atheros wifi card off amazon marked ENGINEERING SAMPLES ONLY, because no one sells the chipset I want standalone.
Intel chipsets are OEM only. Cards are readily available on Amazon, but are all gray-market apparently.
In short, I don't expect normal users to do this, but I'd expect them to be willing to pay triple the normal markup on $20-$50 componens if they "just worked" in Linux.
To be clear, I'm talking about having an ODM run off copies of Intel/Atheros reference boards. The engineering effort is as low as it gets for hardware manufacturing.
The only wifi device I've had trouble with in recent memory is an Edimax EW-7811Un USB dongle. It "works", but the best transfer rates I've ever gotten out of it were in the hundreds of kilobytes/s, paired with up to 5 minutes of uninterrupted connectivity.
There are problem devices out there, but more and more they're the exception, rather than the rule.
Its not true these days anyway as you can just use the windows drivers if everything else fails. Which works perfectly except the initial 10 minute setup.
Just set up linux on a machine recently with an Intel network chipset. Mint had no driver that supported it so I ended up having to build from source. I can't imagine trying to understand that process if one is not a developer
What I had hoped would happen during install was that the kernel would fall back to some simple driver, kinda like the simple VGA drivers, and then find the correct driver and install that.
Sadly there's no basic compatibility layer for NICs, except in so far as many small manufacturers emulate some specific well known NIC. Intel doesn't really do that, though. But they do tend to update the drivers in linux pretty quickly themselves, which is what makes them attractive for linux use.
FYI mint sucks with these things. Badly. Their driver support seems more random than anything. That said i am pretty sure i remember some kind of bloat kernel in their repos which ships with all the relevant stuff.
There's an official ubuntu mate flavor now which is everything I enjoyed about mint with none of the things I disliked about it, so I'd recommend trying that.
Installed Ubuntu 16.04 yesterday and could not get graphics acceleration to work on Android's emulator. This should be the ideal environment for working with Android...
I cannot understand people that think Ubuntu is on par with OSX and Windows for workstation use.
I've literally never had a sound card that didn't work on Linux since alsa stabilized in the 2.4 days.
WiFi drivers are much less likely to work out-of-the-box; usually you need a firmware file which may require futzing with the windows driver installation package.
Another feature I'm yet to have any confidence in is that I can just close a Linux laptop, and have it do a pretty much perfect suspend that will come back to life in 2-3 seconds even if it's been closed for days.
Same here, both on ThinkPad and on my Tuxedo laptop with Ubuntu, Debian and Arch.
I had issues with OS X sometimes that I put the MacBook into a bag and it would get hotter and hotter because it didn't sleep and the air couldn't move, untill it panicked and shut itself down to not start burning.
I started owning laptops in 2007. There's a real difference between ACPI DSDTs compiled with the Microsoft compiler versus the Intel compiler (surprise surprise)
Acer/Wistron laptop with MSFT DSDT would reset spontaneously instead of waking up from sleep.
I have no complaints about suspend itself, but I do find lidswitch detection to be faintly unreliable on various laptops. I often find my laptop fully powered up and hot in my backpack. I suspect poor debounce.
I cannot remember having any trouble playing DVDs on a Linux based system within the last decade. Through this time, I've used: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch and, Suse. If your distro doesn't come with DVD playing capabilities out of the box, there are plenty of instructions regarding this on the the web.
I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.
I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.
Isn't distributing libdvdcss illegal in the US and therefore most distributions don't include it? So, most distributions don't come with full DVD playing capabilities out of the box.
This. This is the reason for parent's complaint - it's legal, not technical. I have exactly the same experience of "30 mins hacking to make a new system play DVDs" - sure, it's a single package install usually, but which package? libdvdread? libdvdcss? Does the package include the library, or does it contain a script that downloads the library because of the legal issue? I know the answers to these questions on Debian because I use it so much (and it has a well updated wiki), but plonk me in front of a distro I've not used before, or with poor documentation for their particular idiosyncratic way of end-running the law, and suddenly it's a minefield.
I should have been clearer, I guess. Yes, there's some legal issue but - a google search is not illegal. The poster was saying he/she has to go through some lengthy process every time he/she wants to watch a DVD? That's the dishonesty I'm talking about. Getting dvd playback working in a distro is a do it once and forget about it until EOL type thing.
As I recall, installing libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdread from the official repos solved that problem and allowed me to painlessly watch dvd's through players like VLC and MPlayer.
Wow thank you for that link. I've had two browsers installed with chrome being used purely for Netflix. Now I can finally give the damn thing the boot.
I slowed down for a while when I first got Netflix. Then I sped up again when some of the shows I was watching disappeared when I was mid-season. Netflix is great, but when I want to actually be sure that I'll be able to watch something, I buy it.
