Please MS just go to hell...

[Simon]

Yea, I sort of do that with my laptop, I make it wort 0.9GHz instead of 1.8 overclocking to 3.4GHz, the fan shuts up and battery lasts longer, but yes what apple have done takes care of that automatically.

[SiliconWizard]

Just saw a "Windows 365" presentation the other day.

If you thought Windows 11 was a bad idea - take a look at this. This is fun.
Now I can see how this 365 thing can be a "dream" for IT departments though. Well, until something goes really wrong with MS servers or something - but it won't be IT's fault then!

[bd139]

Yeah it’s great. They’re already talking about giving me one of those instead of a laptop. I can connect to it from my Mac and if anything goes wrong I can down tools, sip cocktails in the garden and point at ops. 

[Bud]

Yea but there comes the point where its pointless having 64 cores just to open a PDF.... how much hardware and resources do we waste just to keep companies in business? 99% of machines just need 4 cores at most foe everyday office work. If an employer thinks that having a workforce equipped with machines that can open a document in 10ms instead or 100ms is going to make them more productive they need shooting!

Well, if you factor in all of malware detection and other agents installed on a corporate computer that often deal with Cloud for protection, that may well translate to 1s vs 10s to open a file, so all of a sudden raw performance begins making sense!

[SiliconWizard]

Oh, and if I got it right, they are not just talking about being able to run Android apps, but apparently also MacOS (and possibly Linux soon) apps.

[madires]

Yeah it’s great. They’re already talking about giving me one of those instead of a laptop. I can connect to it from my Mac and if anything goes wrong I can down tools, sip cocktails in the garden and point at ops. 

Actually it's nothing new. Two decades ago we already had MS terminal servers, Citrix and other solutions. Every few years everything is turned upside down and sold as new hype. Now we shall replace fat clients with thin clients, again.

[Simon]

It's a real shame that the linux world spends all it's time falling to peices into factions instead of having one gold standard of linux that just woks. Just about to delete the umteinth install of linux that just didnt do it for me.

[SiliconWizard]

It's a real shame that the linux world spends all it's time falling to peices into factions instead of having one gold standard of linux that just woks.

No it's not, because it's the only real guarantee that it remains independent and free. You can't have it all.

[madires]

Yea but there comes the point where its pointless having 64 cores just to open a PDF.... how much hardware and resources do we waste just to keep companies in business? 99% of machines just need 4 cores at most foe everyday office work.

Even two core CPUs are sufficient for typical office usage. One core for the current application in use and the second one for antivirus, printing and other tasks.

[SiliconWizard]

Yea but there comes the point where its pointless having 64 cores just to open a PDF.... how much hardware and resources do we waste just to keep companies in business? 99% of machines just need 4 cores at most foe everyday office work.

Even two core CPUs are sufficient for typical office usage. One core for the current application in use and the second one for antivirus, printing and other tasks.

Well. The moment resources for executing a given task - the part that is useful for the user - become a small fraction of necessary resources for running all housekeeping/"administrative" tasks behind the scenes, you know something is going wrong and will not end up well. It's like when administration becomes predominant in a given company. It rarely ends up very well...

[Simon]

well as it stands it's the reserve of a few nerds and anti capitalism nutjobs in the desktop segment. No software house will support the thousands of versions of linux. Like drop box, every time I went onto linux, dropbox was logged out. I just can't be assed to try and figure out why every thing that I can take for granted to work on windows does not work on linux even though the program for the same service was developed for linux and even though drop box claims to contain open source software....

Independent you say? Independent of what? I want an operating system that works and does not force me to do things that I don't need to do but it wants me to for it's own financial gain and, I will pay money for that just as I was willing to pay money for windows.

Sadly the reactOS project is just a feeble joke as there is precious little hardware they will write drivers for for their own operating system, it's just an even worse cause than linux. No wonder microsoft can do as it pleases.

[coppice]

well as it stands it's the reserve of a few nerds and anti capitalism nutjobs in the desktop segment. No software house will support the thousands of versions of linux.

I guess you don't consider engineering workstations, like EDA machines, to be desktops. No software house needs to support many versions of Linux. They pick one or two well supported ones, and stick with them.

[Simon]

well as it stands it's the reserve of a few nerds and anti capitalism nutjobs in the desktop segment. No software house will support the thousands of versions of linux.

I guess you don't consider engineering workstations, like EDA machines, to be desktops. No software house needs to support many versions of Linux. They pick one or two well supported ones, and stick with them.

Enginering workstations? yes they are desktop, even including those what percentage seriously use linux? what is an EDA machine?

Hm, one or two well supported versions? like which one or two? there are more than one or two and unless all software makers pick the same one or two you will never have a complete system. Basically until Microsoft release a distro there won't be wide scale use of Linux.

[coppice]

well as it stands it's the reserve of a few nerds and anti capitalism nutjobs in the desktop segment. No software house will support the thousands of versions of linux.

I guess you don't consider engineering workstations, like EDA machines, to be desktops. No software house needs to support many versions of Linux. They pick one or two well supported ones, and stick with them.

Enginering workstations? yes they are desktop, even including those what percentage seriously use linux? what is an EDA machine?

Hm, one or two well supported versions? like which one or two? there are more than one or two and unless all software makers pick the same one or two you will never have a complete system. Basically until Microsoft release a distro there won't be wide scale use of Linux.

Ubuntu and RedHat seem to be the platforms of choice for most CAD tools, like EDA (Electronic Design Automation). Basic CAD tools, like PCB design, are most often seen on Windows machines, but I've never seem serious silicon design on Windows. Some basic ASIC development, but nothing more. I wonder if there are still holdouts, designing silicon with derivatives of the old Sun systems.

[Simon]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

[madires]

No software house will support the thousands of versions of linux.

That's a preconception, and it's incorrect. There are a few "root" distributions which are the base for most other distributions. And there are many tools to convert packages from one format to another.

[coppice]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

When you say edit, do you mean the forms filling functions you get with the Adobe tools, or actually altering the document/ The Adobe tools work for form filling, but most other Linux tools don't seem to have taken forms as seriously as they might have. For general document editing, what's wrong with LibreOffice, or Lyx, or a number of other document tools?

[rsjsouza]

Yeah that’s why they mostly have 4 cores.

I like Apple’s approach. They have 4 performance optimised cores and 4 energy efficient cores and schedule the work according to requirements. If you’ve got crap ticking over not doing anything important it goes on the energy efficiency cores. Result - I charge this laptop every 2-3 days. That’s the game changer.

See: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=vk3m204o

This concept of multiple asymmetric cores comes from the mobile industry, but since the turnaround of terminals in that industry is so fast, the software efforts to use these extra cores was either not implemented nor efficient (the first octa-core processors had four of them simply powered off, and I suspect this is still the rule). Apple seems to actually have done the proper work to fully partition the system and use them in a way that benefits the overall product.

[coppice]

Yeah that’s why they mostly have 4 cores.

I like Apple’s approach. They have 4 performance optimised cores and 4 energy efficient cores and schedule the work according to requirements. If you’ve got crap ticking over not doing anything important it goes on the energy efficiency cores. Result - I charge this laptop every 2-3 days. That’s the game changer.

See: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=vk3m204o

This concept of multiple asymmetric cores comes from the mobile industry, but since the turnaround of terminals in that industry is so fast, the software efforts to use these extra cores was either not implemented nor efficient (the first octa-core processors had four of them simply powered off, and I suspect this is still the rule). Apple seems to actually have done the proper work to fully partition the system and use them in a way that benefits the overall product.

I don't know why that would be lacking in Android, as Linux can handle those asymmetric machines quite well. Intel has blown hot and cold over asymmetric cores because MS has taken so long to get proper handing into Windows, and they won't release parts that aren't handled well by Windows. I read that WIndows 11 was finally getting support, but Intel seems to have just canned another asymmetric cores project.

[Simon]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

When you say edit, do you mean the forms filling functions you get with the Adobe tools, or actually altering the document/ The Adobe tools work for form filling, but most other Linux tools don't seem to have taken forms as seriously as they might have. For general document editing, what's wrong with LibreOffice, or Lyx, or a number of other document tools?

You can't "just" open any PDF in libre office and start editing.....

[coppice]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

When you say edit, do you mean the forms filling functions you get with the Adobe tools, or actually altering the document/ The Adobe tools work for form filling, but most other Linux tools don't seem to have taken forms as seriously as they might have. For general document editing, what's wrong with LibreOffice, or Lyx, or a number of other document tools?

You can't "just" open any PDF in libre office and start editing.....

True. They come up with the tag "This document is open in read-only mode". You click "edit document" and off you go.

[Simon]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

When you say edit, do you mean the forms filling functions you get with the Adobe tools, or actually altering the document/ The Adobe tools work for form filling, but most other Linux tools don't seem to have taken forms as seriously as they might have. For general document editing, what's wrong with LibreOffice, or Lyx, or a number of other document tools?

You can't "just" open any PDF in libre office and start editing.....

True. They come up with the tag "This document is open in read-only mode". You click "edit document" and off you go.

As the forum rules do not permit me to call you an idiot I will demonstrate!

Attached are two screen shots, one of a PDF readers view of the document and one of libre office draw, yea, because despite opening it in writer it decided to switch to draw. As you can hopefully see even before I give a toss about being able to edit, libre office could not even interpret the document properly. To the point that "rectifier" has become "rectier". i will happily pay someone money for a program specifically written to work on the PDF format, for the sub £200 that is better use of my time/money than titting about with a tool that was not really meant to do this job or at least they are still working on it! Lets not start talking about the inability in libre draw to do bookmarks and I don't have the time trying to find out if all of my lovely bookmarks will disappear the moment I hit save in libre office draw....

[bd139]

Got to say I’m not a fan of libreoffice as a whole. Utterly clunky bit of gear. O365 family costs me about £55 a year and gives 6 people the ability to run native office apps on 6 devices each. That’s not much money for the reduction in arse ache. Also it does a marginally better job of PDF editing.

But the Mac wins on that. Open pdf on iPad, draw notes on it, save it again.

Another but though. Thou should not be editing PDFs really. They’re a “committed” format. The source document should be edited and a new PDF generated.

[Simon]

I like libre office, it does not treat me like an idiot and do stuff "for me" that I neither asked for or wanted. I also has nice features 365 does not. For example in calc unlike in exel I can insert a row or column before or after another. When you have lines/borders drawn up and want a row inside the border this is a godsend as in excel it has you redrawing your borders and wasting a lot of time.

But PDF format is a a format of it's own and needs treating properly.

I produced that document by printing from multiple web pages put together into one document. The only way to do this in libre office is to copy paste each paragraph and image one by one and line them up. So it is easier to handle this document in PDF entirely. Yes if I was writing the whole document I would do it in a word processor. Also libre office will not handle the formula's often in these documents so I would have to recreate them from scratch. The are not exactly editble in PDF but at least they display correctly and I can carefully make minor edits.

[Nominal Animal]

Are they the platforms of choice for everything else? I tried to find me a PDF editor for linux, again, happy to hand over money, I got a trial for a program that was god awful and did not count as it could not properly deciper the PDF and allow me to edit text with every word being split into multiple text boxes.... On windows i have many options. All other programs claiming to be PDF editors were all lying as all they banged on about was adding notes to a PDF not editing the original text.

I use Inkscape for this.  It only does one page at a time, though.  Note that you do need to obtain the font used in the PDF, to be able to edit the text and not have it look all wonky; the default font name matching is less than optimal.  I typically first split the PDF into separate pages (pdfseparate source.pdf page-%05d.pdf) or page groups (isolating the to-be-edited pages), optionally convert the PDF to PostScript (since there are more editing options for PostScript than PDF), edit the pages in various tools including Inkscape, then combine the pages into a new PDF.

I used to have a very capable cow-orker who demanded self-contained applications suites and editors, just like they were used to having in Windows.  I tried to help them see that instead of looking for a specific type of tool, they should concentrate on how to solve the underlying problem.  They refused (by saying they weren't interested in that, and just wanted to solve the problem at hand without wasting time), and kept calling Linux "open sores crap", because it wasn't sufficiently Windows-like.

As long as you use Linux as if it was a no-cost version of Windows, you will be unhappy.