Does somebody use both, current Intel and AMD tower PCs?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2023-03-19 at 15:27 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> AMD's GPU drivers are FOSS and so much less hassle than nVidia's.

Hi,

one of my mobos was equipped with an onboard ATI. The available ATI
driver for Linux supported the ATI card, excepted of the onboard
variant. Apart from this the ATI drivers only worked with dedicated
versions of xorg.

I remember that I once had a modem and all 3 variants were supported.
Unfortunately the vendor forgot that a few modems with a 4th unsupported
variant was sold, the one I owned.

Intel GPU drivers are FLOSS, too. It was the first graphics I owned that
worked and now works flawlessly again, but since Intel dropped Linux
support, the driver was broken for a short time. For that short, but for
my taste still too long time, the user could chose between either
continue using the "intel" driver by downgrading the kernel or by
migrating to the modesetting driver and breaking some software.

I never had a driver related issue with my NVIDI graphics, excepted when
choosing the FLOSS driver. While nv was dropped, the nouveau driver
didn't work for a very, very long time with some cards. However, I had
serious issues related to real-time audio with ATI and NVIDIA graphics.
Even without a shared IRQ, there was some impact that misbehaved like a
shared IRQ, this never happened with my Intel GPU.

I can't comment on AMD nowadays, formerly named ATI. Anyway, I don't
trust claims related to supported hardware. They are often untrue,
incomplete or support status might change over time.

It's claimed that my RME HDSPe AIO audio card is supported, but I never
got all 8 ADAT channels working of my card.

> AMD owns the low end: its chips with integrated GPUs offer way more
> bang-for-the-buck than low-end Intels.

Is it really this way nowadays? On paper my old cheap AMD CPUs were
better than cheap Intel CPUs, but I never was able to get a reliable low
cost real-time machine with any of those CPUs. When I migrated to the
cheap Intel Celeron I got my first reliable real-time machine.

> I know nothing about the Australian market but I did not believe this
> so I Googled "Linux computer Austrialia" and found several

In Australia it's probably the same as in Germany. You can get machines
with Linux installed, but you can't get one by supermarkets such as ALDI
or by consumer electronics stores such as Saturn you get machines with
freakish hardware, for example

A dual-core Celeron with 8 GiB RAM and a Kingston 240 GB SSD. The specs
claim 1x PS/2, but the picture shows 2x PS/2

https://www.saturn.de/de/product/_hyptech-aurum-ic-budget-i-pc-desktop-8-gb-ram-87448254.html

Does Kingston provide a Linux tool for the SSD you can run from Ubuntu?

You can get the same, with selected components, such as a KIOXIA SSD,
that provides a tool to update the firmware when running Ubuntu and more
RAM for the same amount of money. I know, since I own a similar Intel
Celeron Linux machine, but put together by my own. My machine is 6 years
old, I want to replace it, since it's not fast enough for nowadays
software anymore.

IMO users who can not or do not want to put together the machine on
their own, better buy a Windows PC from a supermarket and replace
Windows by Linux, than buying such a low-end Saturn computer with
Ubuntu.

Btw. I wonder about the

"Recommended system requirements:

    2 GHz dual-core processor or better
    4 GB system memory
    25 GB of free hard drive space" [1]

IMO those requirements are close to the minimum requirements, while
"25 GB of free hard drive space" is already below a needed minimum, for
users who really use their computers.

Regards,
Ralf

[1] https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop