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Which is the most stable and proper Linux for general desktop use?

X

xMax

Senior member
Actually, i would want the one that also playsback media files, like my AVI animation, in the best possible way.

Yes, i know, your thinking "what...windows is not good enough?". The answer to that question is quite simply that windows is fine, but has this tearing problem which is impossible to get rid off. And after numerous inquiries, i have come to learn that it is actually impossible to fix the problem since it lies at the core of the windows GDI API.

Of course, the problem doesnt appear on all configurations. That is, not all systems will have the tearing problem.

Ive also hear that Windows Vista has gotten rid of this problem, but im not going to get Vista just yet since its not proper to have it as the primary operating system for serious or professional work.

And so, after much reading, ive discovered that Linus based operating systems dont have any tearing at all, which sounds lovely for me.

Also, since i just need an os for the most basic function of all, AVI playback, then the limitations of incompatibilities that linux has will not be of relevance.

So far, i have had a recommendation for Ubuntu. Any other recomendations.

Thanks
 
Ubuntu is what you are going to hear. its great.

Others: Suse, fedora, debian, gentoo. Those are the next top 4 you will hear about. I'm a gentoo guy myself, but for someone with no linux exp you will want to stick with something like ubuntu.
 
It's realy up to personal taste.

I prefer Debian, but Debian isn't realy suitable for most people that aren't familar with Linux, IMO.

Debian Stable is probably going to be the most stable and trouble-free system you can find. However the trade off is that your going to loose out in improvements in functionality that other distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora is going to offer. I use Debian Sid, which is the unstable version, but you'd have to deal with large updates and churning of new packages and changes all the time, which can be a hassle.

Generally Ubuntu is a good place to start. It's not perfect for everybody and I don't recommend everybody should be using it. Choosing a distro is very much personal taste, but you have to start somewere and Ubuntu is as good as anything else.

Just be sure to read the wiki FAQ section, it'll be helpfull. Also your going to learn how to manage packages and setup 3rd party repositories for 'restricted' formats. Due to legal and licensing issues some packages, like those needed for mp3 playback, are not aviable from the default setup of Ubuntu and other distros. This avoids problems that a person may run into in professional or educational enviroments (for instance).

But it's not to difficult and is decently documented.

For media players the default (totem) that comes with gnome is so-so. Check out VLC and try that out. For DVD playback I prefer Xine...you'd have to still deal with libdvdcss related packages for breaking dvd encryption to play most dvds on Linux. It's not to difficult, but again it's going to be avaible via the non-default setup.

For highest quality output possible check out mplayer. It's more of a hassle to deal with, but it's going to provide the most options and the best performance. It's only realy best for media junkies. They have a counterpart called mencoder that is a encoding program for making divx-like avi files and such. It's very capable.and by doing 2-pass encoding using libavcodec will provide the highest quality output for recorded dvds you can get anywere. It has all this extra features for screen ratios and pixel stuff and framerate stuff that only realy video-phile people are going to care about. Use the 'xv' video driver in mplayer for low-cpu playback. If your interested mplayer has extensive documentation on their website. I use the command line version, I never liked the GUI version of mplayer.

For most everything though VLC is fine. It plays almost every weird format ever created, also it can deal with playback from hardware capture devices and dvds and such. As a bonus it can be used to stream media out over a network. For some stuff like wmv files and some quicktime files you'd have to install the win32-codecs packages, which again is aviable from 3rd party places. It's covered in Ubuntu's wikis and such. Ubuntu also has decent forums and IRC channels for help and such.

 
Since you are a first time user, I would recommend Suse desktop 10 for you. Free to download. Once you configured automatic updates (for. ex., mirrors.kernel.org), you won't need CDs and installation of patches and packages becomes an easy task in YaST. Suse provides great support for a lot of new hardware coming up on the market nowadays.

Debian Ubuntu is good too. That will be my second choice like the previous guys mentioned it.

Good luck!
 
Sounds interesting but time consuming to get to know it. Im going to try Windows 64-bit first. If that doesnt fix my problems, then i will re-read your reply and do what needs to be done to get it up and running.

However, there are issues already that i foresee, and that is that the monitor i got needs to be caibrated with a propriety software called color navigator, from the company called EIZO, who i got the monitor from. And this program is only available for windows or mac os, which right there is a considerable problem for me. I dont think the windows version will run on linux, and if that is so, then resorting to linux will be a problem.

My apologies for having noticed this just now. unless that program and the eyeone pro hardware calibrator will work in linux, then i will give it a shot in the advent that Windows 64 doesnt work out.

but thanks for the info.
 
No linux help here, just wanted to point out that OP has an ATI vid card. not many distros are happy with ATI, esp. something that new.
 
Originally posted by: xMax
Sounds interesting but time consuming to get to know it. Im going to try Windows 64-bit first. If that doesnt fix my problems, then i will re-read your reply and do what needs to be done to get it up and running.

However, there are issues already that i foresee, and that is that the monitor i got needs to be caibrated with a propriety software called color navigator, from the company called EIZO, who i got the monitor from. And this program is only available for windows or mac os, which right there is a considerable problem for me. I dont think the windows version will run on linux, and if that is so, then resorting to linux will be a problem.

My apologies for having noticed this just now. unless that program and the eyeone pro hardware calibrator will work in linux, then i will give it a shot in the advent that Windows 64 doesnt work out.

but thanks for the info.
Click to expand...


Yep. There is no hardware device (that is even remotely affordable) that you can use to help calibrate color profiles for your monitor.

There are things you can use to help deal with icc profiles.. but the one that most people do is just to adjust the gamma on their monitors as close as possible to the ideal. There is a utility that nvidia provides with their propriatory drivers that can adjust the display color.. and you can use xgamma to adjust the X Windows display to get as nice as possible.

There are a few apps like this one:
http://www.pcbypaul.com/software/GAMMApage.html

For scanners and printers it's possible to get very good profiles made...

Color management in Linux is still immature. In Windows and OS X you have there hardcore color management systems, but all of them are highly propriatory and secretive and 'protected' by licensing, secrecy, patents and crap like that.

Most art programs that would benifit from color calibration have it aviable to them in one form or another. In Gimp it's supported so-so. For something like Scribus, which is a desktop layout program similar to indesign or Quark, then it has good support.

It's also possible to generate color profiles in Windows and use them in Linux, but this I don't think, is going to be accurate since there is driver differences and such. Also adobe and such have icc profiles you can download, although obviously they are generic.

There are a couple CMS systems that I know about for Linux.. There is:
http://www.argyllcms.com/

Which is usefull for generating icc profiles to be used in programs and files that support that sort of thing.

and littlecms, which is used in some programs.
http://www.littlecms.com/

Ufortunately for Linux there is no hardware calibration for your monitor.. adjusting the xgamma and then eye balling it is the best you can do at this point.
 
Hmm... Well, i guess its possible that i could use some of these linux tools to calibrate my monitor. However, there is a newly released technology called L*, which is a way of calibrating a monitor to the most linear possible state with respect to human vision. That is, produces the most linear grayscales possible. This technology, as of yet, is only available with two programs, coloreyes display and colornavigator, with the latter being the one for me since its the propriety software that comes with my monitor and has an edge on the coloreyes display by taking advantage of a factory calibration that is burnt onto a rom chip in the monitor. Anyhow, L* is something im currently investigating at this moment in time, and in the advent that it is a must, then i have no choice but to stick with windows. Of course, after having installed a trial versino of Windows X64, i came to discover that the hardware drivers that are required to make the eyeone pro hardware calibrator function is not available. In plain, im an idiot for not having checked to see if the gretagmacbeth, the company that makes these calibrators, had the X64 drivers, which they will not have until the beginning of 2006.

So im back to Windows XP Home SP2.

Anyhow, i have to work out wether i need L* and wether i even need linux, since im short on time and thus cannot waist time trying to learn and setup linux. If i dont need L*, then i will certainly be back here asking questions and rereading all the info in this thread.
 
Becarefull of marketting hype. Color management is difficult and there is all sorts of details that are hard to understand.. it leaves the way open for the more greasy side of the computer industry. Not that I am saying that that is what your talking about. I have no clue about it, this is L* stuff.

One of the big troubles before was that you had all these different monitor technologies and such.. You had film, tv monitors, computer monitors, and other stuff like that. Each with it's own paticularly weird legacy from the time it was created in. It's very difficult to match up all this stuff together.

But now that everything is standardizing around HDTV and such they are getting a chance to get things right and make it rather simplier.

However it's disapointing to me that everybody is using LCD displays and such.. LCD typically has much poorer color and gamma stuff then CRT monitors. Basicly the gamma changes according in relationship to the location of your head and angles. So a lcd monitor looking right at one sitting position won't be right in another sitting position. Also color depth and grayscale depth isn't as nice. In CRTs the black can get blacker and the whites can get whiter.. with LCDs you can turn up the brightness to get things very white, but then the darks are lightened up also.

But the very nice thing for LCD is that you can run very high resolutions with no refresh rate issues (well, less issues), and that they can be very big without taking up space.. which is absolutely great.

But that's neither here no their.

On Linux color management can be best described as 'craptastic' and 'difficult', but it's there.

If you want to try out what it looks like check out Knoppix. It's a live linux cdrom that you can boot up and run the OS from without having to install anything.

It uses KDE desktop (I prefer gnome personally that has a different look and feel) and it uses some special filesystem magic so you can download and install software on it in a temporary basis. You probably won't have gammapage on it, but if your adventorious you could probably get it to work from the livecd, but it won't be easy for a guy new to Linux.

I beleive that KDE has a gamma adjustment tool in their desktop, but I can't recall right now what it is. You should be able to find that without much effort and muck around with that.

But at least it will give you a idea of what to expect without having to sacrifice any data on your harddrive.


edit:
I looked at that Eizo stuff and all that looks very nice and usefull. Those high-end lcd displays look fantastic.

Here is a article about how to do monitor calibration on linux.
http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/07/2244242

Not nearly as nice as using a hardware calibration tool. 🙁
 
The info your giving me is quite interesting. Its actually helping me understand other stuff that i was in need of understanding. Personally, i cant stand color management, as i am a newbie to it. Right now im trying to understand this so called linear L* feature, which i have already used. Its supposed to produce a perfectly linear grayscale ramp from 0 to 255, but it doesn't! I have used varying grayscale ramps, and one professional one that comes with the EIZO monitor, and the image is not linear. To me, linear should mean that seeing the difference between any two steps, such as 0 and 1 or 254 and 255, should be the same. But with L*, i can clearly and easily see the difference between 0 and 1, even if im far away from the monitor and under varying lighting conditions, whereas with 254 and 255 its a completely different story. I have to be up close to barely see the difference. This right there means that the grayscale is not linear. My problem right now is trying to understand wether this lack of uniformity is actually supposed to be like that, or because the technology is not yet capable of producing a linear grayscale. Another words, i keep hearing that the eye actually sees brightness logarithmycally, and that forcing a monitor to display images linearly will degrade the perceptual resolution in certain regions of the grayscale of the eye itself.

This is my post in another Forum.

Anyhow, this is not what i came here looking for, since this is not the right forum for that kind of information. I came here to inquire as to which Linux to get, and now i have discovered that color management in linux, especially with something like L*, and using a hardware calibrator that i have already paid a 1000 dollars for, is difficult and actually impossible with the hardware device that i have. The point is that whatever the situation, wether i need this L* or not, i have just 1 week left to finish my work, which is simply come down to proper calibration of a monitor to play out an AVI animation. Plain and simple. But the idea is that i just dont think that i have the time to find the right Linux and be able to install, learn, and configure it to achieve a level of calibration that i would be able to in Windows XP.

And so, unless you can explain to me how i can fully get Linux to work within a week, then ill take it into serious consideration. Otherwise, sticking with windows is just much safer right now since ive been using windows all my life and know it rather well.

But nuntheless, you have provided me with important information that has allowed me to make a proper decision with respect to wether i should take the Linux path at this moment in time, which of course is no. Had you not provided me with such quick info, i might have could have wound up losing several days figuring out if linux and which linux would be right for me, and possibly having installed it and waisted my time.

So I thank you for your help.

And yes, those EIZO monitors are the best in the world. Nobody has better LCD monitors than EIZO. i also had to go with an LCD because i needed DVI and i needed a sharp image, which LCDs are good for.

Max
 
And so, unless you can explain to me how i can fully get Linux to work within a week, then ill take it into serious consideration. Otherwise, sticking with windows is just much safer right now since ive been using windows all my life and know it rather well.
Click to expand...

Nope. Sorry can't do that. You'll have to stick with windows for the time being, especially if you need it done in a week!

I just like getting information out on a public forum so that you can other people can read it for future reference. I am quite a newbie when it comes to color management also. 🙂

Beleive me, your not going to be the only person that runs into these issues. Maybe it will help somebody else also. Maybe in a year or so when you want to give it a shot again, then it'll be easier to find more information out. It's sometimes hard to know were to start.

Even with very high-end color management stuff it's still technically crap in the larger sceme of things. It's just in Linux it's much worse.

People are working on it for Linux. See here if curious: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc

But it's going to take a long time. Another year, maybe more, before well start seeing any major difference. (if ever) It's just for the longest time nobody cared and there were bigger technical issues.. now that Linux is more and more usable for graphics and photo editing, developers are starting to get motivated to fix the limitations.
 
Well thats good to hear man. Knowing that taking linux would be the wrong direction is serious help to me right now. And i fully agree with you about color management being crap. To be honest, ive always dispised photoshop. I mean, its the best thing out there for all photo related stuff, but im not into photo and it just scares me with the amount of features and bulk that it has.

Anyhow, its good to know that Linux is out of the question for me right now with the amount of time i have left.

Thanks a bunch.

Max
 
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