before anyone gets too excited, this doesn’t seem like it applies to DG2 gaming cards, ATSM and PVC are compute cards
<span style="color:#323232;">+SR-IOV Capability
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+=================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Due to SR-IOV complexity and required co-operation between hardware, firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+and kernel drivers, not all Xe architecture platforms might have SR-IOV enabled
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+or fully functional.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+To control at the driver level which platform will provide support for SR-IOV,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+as we can't just rely on the PCI configuration data exposed by the hardware,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+we will introduce "has_sriov" flag to the struct xe_device_desc that describes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+a device capabilities that driver checks during the probe.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Initially this flag will be set to disabled even on platforms that we plan to
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+support. We will enable this flag only once we finish merging all required
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+changes to the driver and related validated firmwares are also made available.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+SR-IOV Platforms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Initially we plan to add SR-IOV functionality to the following SDV platforms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+already supported by the Xe driver:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - TGL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - ADL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - MTL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - ATSM (up to 31 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - PVC (up to 63 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Newer platforms will be supported later, but we hope that enabling will be
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+much faster, as majority of the driver changes are either platform agnostic
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+or are similar between earlier platforms (hence we start with SDVs).
</span>
It’s a rabbit hole, you have to get fairly deep into it to start reaping some “benefits”. Even if you start with something easy like cinnamon mint, there’s a small chance it might break something on major upgrade. But it’s generally fairly easy to fix if you have some grasp on the system.
The best way to learn would be to just install something like arch or debian in a VM but do everything in manual steps while trying to understand what every step’s accomplishing.
Can we now also focus on stabilizing everything? For the past 5-10 years, my personal KDE experience ws either features disappearing (i still mourn my Desktop cube) or just random shit.not working for years. I got to the point where a few months ago I seriously started to consider cinnamon, what are you doing to me?
You can do everything but you will have problems with word documents. There’s online office for better compatability with the caveat of reduced functionality. There’s great compatability with Only Office and WPS Office but its not perfect.
There was a comment recommending Zorin OS and I agree. Its a great distro to switch to from windows. Setup is easy and flathub is included in the software store.
I’d recommend trying Linux on dualboot and see if you can replace windows!
Video formats? There literally are VLC, ffmpeg and MPV. Every normal format works on every Distro.
Get most apps from Flathub.org, use any Distro you want but I recommend Fedora Kinoite.
Word documents for sure, PDF editing actually too. PDF editing is cursed in itself, but Okular + PDF arranger + Firefox + sometimes GIMP (for actually censoring) work.
Have a look at Stirling PDF, a project combining all of these effords. Its not yet a fully graphical desktop app but this command will work on Fedora Kinoite:
If you don’t want to get them from microsoft, you can purchase a license elsewhere. Microsoft allows them to be distributed freely as long as the files are not modified. That’s why they are always packaged in an executable installer.
Those fonts are not free. They may be just ttf files, but there is a massive amount of work that goes into creating a font with unicode support. If you just want fonts for basic compatibility, you can use open source fonts with compatible metrics such as the Liberation fonts or use the microsoft core fonts that haven’t been updated in 20 years.
Many fonts have a license that allows them to be embedded in a pdf. Newer fonts usually have a flag that tells the software if the font can be embedded or not, not all software respects that flag though. Older fonts don’t have the flag and will embed even if you are not allowed to embed them.
Thanks for the info! So the entire .ttf package is embedded, or every single character as SVG? Damn that sounds like a waste of space compared to HTML where fonts with alternatives and fallback also work.
Others have given you some good advice but I’ll still give you my opinion because more data points is good.
First of all, as others said, it’s better perhaps if you switch your home computer first or try it out on a VM or dual-boot first as you learn how to use it rather than erasing Windows altogether at first. Regardless of your choice I’d recommend giving it a try still.
Affordability is not a concern at all, most Linux Distros are free and they’ll work perfectly fine, usually when you pay for distros you’re either paying for better tech support or to support the distro itself, and a lot of the software that’s on the repos is also free.
Your biggest concern probably would be re-learning the OS. Now, obviously Linux and windows work very differently, for example installing software on Linux is mainly done via an app-store or the terminal. As for graphics, shortcuts, etc, there’s two approaches here, which one is better depends on your preferences. You can either stick to something similiar to windows, so any distro that has Cinnamon, KDE plasma, or Xfce (you will have to move a few stuff and configure it a bit at the beginning) will do well, I’d recommend Linux Mint; or you can do something more different that will force you to learn something new and will tell you visually “Look, I’m not windows, I’m built different!” so something like GNOME (or customize the other DEs to something you like), personally I’m not a fan of GNOME but it works well for your use-case, as any DE will do, in this case I recommend Pop!_OS.
Both of my recommendetions use apt and are debian (through Ubuntu as the middledistro) derivatives btw. This is important because when you encounter a problem or a certain software not being in the repo it is good to look for sources closely related to your distro.
Linux can do everything you mentioned and more, however compatibility with M$ Word documents/etc can be a bit iffy. Personally I always used LibreOffice and aside from some minor annoyances never had issues with it and using .docx but I also don’t work at a professional environment that requires it to work perfectly. However you’re in luck as you can still use M$ office & other stuff from your browser if needed, tho I assume it will have less resources and will require an internet connection (this can be mitigated by working offline with LibreOffice, OpenOffice or any Office suite you like then copy-pasting it to M$ word or whatever), tho I wouldn’t know since I don’t use either and never planning on doing so. There’s also google docs.
Video types should work just fine especially common ones, VLC is a powerful tool. If you’re installing Mint make sure to install the media codecs at install.
Also I recommend learning the terminal, it may seem scary at first but it is easy, fast and will help you troubleshoot. Also accept that you will encounter problem, like in every system, and you’re expected to solve them yourself, this means you can spend a lot of time looking up stuff, learning to look at logs, etc. This will of course take time but it would take as much if not more time on windows too sometimes, on the bright side Linux tends to be a little better at telling you the problem if you know what to look for and also you almost never have to deal with an issue until the company fixes it, you can literally go and fix the code yourself if needs be. Anyways, on this end I recommend using a stable distribution (like the ones I mentioned), stick to the official repos as much as possible, and at install make a separate partition for your home folder, that way worst case scenario you can always just reinstall the OS (takes 15 mins) without losing your files*. Also, this goes for everything and I can’t stress it enough: MAKE FREQUENT BACKUPS, and better yet do them in multiple places: Proton Drive, external hard disk/USB, an other drive on your PC, whatever just have at least one, preferably 2+, place that isn’t your computer or its main drive be your backup space. This goes for Windows too and even though I assume you know it I will still say it because it’s extremely important and always overlooked.
*Unless you erase the partition by mistake or something.
P.S. also given the nature of your job, you might want to encrypt the hard disk (write the password somewhere and make sure to use a password specifically for it and one you can remember, password managers/generators don’t help here) and learn to use the gpg command when you need to encrypt and sign documents.
Personally if it were me and gaming was my primary focus, I’d go to the place that’s doing the most with gaming and Linux, SteamOS.
There are lots of sites that go through the process of building a Linux gaming machine using SteamOS.
Here’s just one random video I found (not affiliated with this at all) about using an old optiplex from eBay, some ram upgrades, and a RX580 GPU. Apparently they did this for $150 but take that with a grain of salt. Hope this helps.
Libertinus Serif (much nicer Times New Roman-ish serif text font. Huge amount of glyphs, open source font license, great to read on display and on print)
Lato (Sans font which imo compliments Libertinus Serif really good. More for short texts, headlines etc. I wouldn’t recommend it as a UI font. Also permissive font license.)
@Vitaly@m5rki5n pop os is great, after being back and forth with ubuntu, debian and later arch. I just came to the conclusion that I wanted to have something that works out of the box.
You need to try it. Don’t just roll it out in your business. Try it yourself before. Get an old/secondary computer and install it, try your templates and workflows. See which version (distribution) you like. Get your E-Mail connected and so on.
I can tell you Linux isn’t Windows or MacOS. For me, it works very well. I can do lots of things Windows users can not do or that are very cumbersome there, and I don’t have any advertisements or privacy issues. It respects my rights and freedoms as a user. And I’ve had way less issues with my printers and stuff than my windows-friends. I’ve never had a virus on my machine. I can’t tell you if it works for you.
I also don’t like selling it. It’s (arguably) better, faster and more user-friendly than Windows in many ways. But you need to find out if you can make use of it. One big factor against it would be familiarization with a different product. Except for that, I invite you to try it.
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.