Which is ironic as this was a complain (dual monitor support) that was addressed on the latest update, I was surprised that they did some effort on that, many games my not work well on dual monitor setup, but steam and valve games have been updated for that.

Time to look at alternatives...

I wish I knew this before buying a quad core A6 laptop, their graphics card driver is abysmal compared to nVidia, which is increasing the performance of their drivers even more.

AMD is doing a very risky bet, the ARM64 has not been well tested in real server workloads, it may as well flop and take the company with it, their opteron line was excellent for virtualization thanks to the many cores, hardware virtualization support and a good performance/price point this new ARM64 has only the low power utilization and low heat as main selling point.

While is nice to have better control over this features we need to first get them working reliably, I still can't get KDE to start with max the laptop monitor max resolution, it will always go back to a 1280x768 and I have to change it manually.

In the end we get back to the same old problem with Linux graphics, driver support. I remember back a couple of years having a nvidia card with the binary blob, most stuff worked as I wanted but screen adjusting and multimonitor had to be done via nvidia tools, but in the end of the day it works. Now I have an ATI card and I cannot get multimonitor working properly even with its own tools, on a more powerful card with more memory.

For quite a while I think there has been no real interest on doing this overhaul as most of those features would not work releably on most systems.

I had a "white box" server back in 2004 with slackware, a very puny 256mb pentium 4 with tailor made (compiled) kernel, and for around 5 years it kept going very well serving a small PHP app with MySQL and email, it runned like a champ, we tried to keep it up to date but then we forgot about it for a couple of years, then a few changes to the hosted app needed an upgrade again and there is where disaster struck, never upgrade more than 2 versions up, we screwed glibc update.

In the end we reinstalled debian to lower maintance overhead while keeping it updated, but once you configure slackware it runs smoothly until the end of the hardware itself.

Wayland requires a few things that are Linux specific, for example, Kernel Mode Setting (which there seems to be some effort to port it to FreeBSD), Direct Rendering Manager drivers and supporting components (which Intel drivers are ported but others are not), and udev, as far as I can see in the FreeBSD forums there isn't much urgency to get in the Wayland wagon, Xorg will be around for quite a long time.

I don't really see much of a case of throwing the house out just to get "butter smooth" GUI, as far as I can tell linux GUIs has been good enough since quite some time, I have yet to see tearing or any graphical problems with firefox like in the "old" days even with many tabs open. While its nice to optimize the stack we loose a few things, first we distance linux yet again from all other Unix-like systems (BSD, like with ALSA vs OSS), then there is driver support, as far as I can see there is no planned support for Wayland from Nvidia or AMD on their proprietary drivers, we are back to square one, with an "exotic" architecture with no full support for modern graphics hardware (OSS vs Proprietary aside), way to go.

As a coder and enthusiast Wayland sounds fantastic, but the reality is that wayland has long long way to go, I personally don't see the need for it.

They should just increase operations in emerging economies, Best Buy in Mexico is doing quite well as far as I know, the Guadalajara store payed off in 1 and a half years when the expected best case scenario was 4 years.

In the U.S. they should just decrease brick and mortar stores and move to online retailing.

Nothing, really!

I can complain a lot about their lack of support of modern X stack, xrandr, etc. But my next card will be nVidia, unless performance is not an issue at all (in which case integrated Intel is more than perfect).

Unless AMD put its stuff together and starts either releasing quality closed drivers or pumping some extra effort (money, more docs, help) onto OSS drivers, I don't see any threat to nVidia in the linux perfomance graphics segment.

I do not think Intel will try to get head to head on the performance GPU market and thus they do not represent a serious threat to nVidia in the linux perfomance graphics segment too.

As others have commented, the wiki is not very clear on all implications on this, but as far as my use of linux (12 years now), I have never had to reboot for any kind of update or security patch that is not kernel related or glibc, that is why I use Linux, because once it works it just keeps working, I really hated the times when even installing an application on Windows would reboot the entire system, WTF?

Seems to me that the upper level of the Linux desktop stack is getting more and more complex and more and more fragile, needing now this kind of "kludges" (in my personal opinion) to keep stuff running.

Fortunately the server side is very different and I hope this does not extend to the server stack, having to reboot because you updated apache, postgresql, php or whatever your stack includes; a good amount of server software is designed to keep working with minimum downtime, even on updates, like nginx that can reload itself without loosing connections (by keeping an instance to finish its work and exit when done while giving the new request to the new reloaded instances), even ssh can be updated without loosing you current session.

nVidia is probably the best option for performance discrete graphics on Linux, I already tried ATI and was deeply dissapointed, while nVidia drivers for my 4-5 year old laptop handle perfectly connecting to my external 1080p monitor my new (few months old) laptop with ATI graphics (A6 APU) totally fails to even drive the monitor over 1440x1024, even tough the ATI card has way more memory available to it.

nVidia propietary drivers work and are well tested, while ATI drivers sort of work most of the time but they are filled with glitches here and there.

Of course, not everything is pink and ponies on the nVidia side, the downside with nVidia is the little to no support to modern X stack and linux graphics standards, xrandr? fuck that use the nVidia panel or no dual monitor for you, KMS? hell no, its all or nothing, ATI is just only a tad better but still useless to me.

On the OSS side of the cards drivers the ATI drivers sort of work, KMS and basic stuff is solid but for modern cards you get mostly no acceleration for anything, which is just a waste of all that silicon, Noveau drivers are the same, basic stuff working but thats all, but Noveau developers have it harder as they have to reverse engenieer all, with no docs at all or help from manufacturer and they have been around less time than ATI devs.

Just don't let Uwe Boll direct or anyware near the studio and you may get a decent adaptation!

I have seen Accounting firms using OpenOffice Calc where I live (Mexico), that was about 3 years ago, not bad given the "utter" dominance of MS Office in this country. OO.org even comes bundled with many computers sold by small computer builders.

"Web Application" Companies of course, good hosting is cheap, self-hosting is cheaper with OSS, tools are top-notch (Django, Ruby on Rails, etc), and the client does not care what the backend is running if it shows in their browser and works well.

Not only ECC, Virtualization Extensions are mostly guaranteed on all AMD cpus, I can't say the same for Intel ones.

Once I was at a library looking for a book, it caught my attention that the computers had Linux (Mandriva) and they called between stores via skype, the point of sale was a text based application (think ncourses).