Finished my contract yesterday, so have left the world of Windows (including 11) to return to the non-MS world of Linux Mint.
Went to use my wireless earbuds (with mic) which worked flawlessly with every PC with Windows I've used these past 9 months and ... just remembered how s**te Linux bluetooth is.
And don't get me started with the lack of Miracast.
Shucks. How about buying a nice new windows machine?
Linux is the tortoise, slow & steady progress. Windows is the harebrained OS, jumping all about the place and never getting there.
Yes, but "Linux" has long since ceased being a single "thing".
That is the tricky thing about Linux: controlling peripherals can be challenging at times. I'd still never go back to Windows, though. 14 years with the penguin now and I've never looked back once. :-)
Are they something special or ?generic? Bluetooth? ( ie Apple or one of the generic brands)
I noticed when I bought Senior Management a set for her iPhone and she paired them simply by placing them next to the phone and, as I recall, none of the ?old fashioned? menu business in settings etc wondering about compatibility with other devices / systems.
I?ve not kept up with the latest Bluetooth developments, perhaps auto pairing is common and compatible.
I?ve not tried Miracast but found this:
bluetooth is about as generic as 'wireless'
cant say Ive used it except to link the phone to te car
I have approached the problem another way, by putting a TV tuner on a PC server with tvheadend. And I will be moving towards dumping all TVs and TVS and simply making them PC monitors.
With a remote keyboard instead of a remote, a linux PC even if its a raspberry Pi is an infinitely smarter thing than any TV.
*Any* windows machine can cast it's screen wirelessly with Win+K
To *any* of the screens and projectors we had around the company.
Most Linux forums don't even know what that feature is called. I know. I asked.
I've been using Mint for a while and, like Jethro, find the bluetooth to be absolutely useless. Maybe it is device specific, I'm using an old Lenovo laptop. As a firm believer in "you get what you pay for", I can't complain.
It's not distro specific. It's Linux itself. Absolutely s**te BT handling.
The main reason is there is no support for HFP/HSP in the stack. So BT headsets won't work.
Apparently Pulseaudio v15 addresses this after 7 ir 8 years.
Still no Miracast though.
I guess because the only peripheral I use is a printer this is the reason I don't experience problems, i won't go back either,
I'm well overdue updating the operating system and wondering if it is worth changing from this I5 to something newer, I9 is too much but I am confused about the different generations of I7 which seen reasonable refurbished, any views?
My starting point is they work - with no effort whatsoever - on the same machine in Windows. (My advice to anyone playing with linux is to do it dual boot so you can eliminate any suggestion it's the hardware when you post for help).
It not a "development". It's removing the HFP/HSP profile from the audio stack in Pulseaudio.
You will notice the comment about how complicated it is ? And the project isn't well supported.
I think I'll have to get a Windows machine.
pipewire is the new pulseaudio, does that handle it? preliminary search suggests it might ...
I had no trouble getting a cheap in BT headset to work with Mint. I must have been about v 16 or earlier. I?ve not bothered since as I use my iPad for Skype.
I asked if your earbuds were Apple as I wonder if they use a feature Mint don?t implement.
The "fix" to get your BT microphone headset to work with (any) distro seems to be to "upgrade" to pipewire. Which I have done, and which totally doesn't work. (It does now see the headset as an input device, but doesn't seem to get a signal from it).
Remember, while I am pissing about with this, 100 people I was supporting just paired their headsets to windows and cracked on with their Teams calls.
The fact these earbuds work flawlessly with my Android phone doesn't improve my mood either ...
Before they screwed up the charts, these are some numbers for single-threaded versus multi-threaded performance. Single-threaded is the best predictor of "snappy" performance. Multithreaded is a predictor of how long your Cinebench or
7Zip compression is going to take.Intel Core2 Duo E8600 @ 3.33GHz 2,412 2C Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.00GHz 4,186 4C Intel Core i7-2700K @ 3.50GHz 8,731 4C/8T Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.20GHz 12,073 4C/8T Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz 16,079 6C/12T
Intel Core2 Duo E8600 @ 3.33GHz 1,374 <=== clock is faster than Q9650 Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.00GHz 1,264 Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.20GHz 2,584 Base 4.20 Max Turbo 4.50 GHz Intel Core i7-2700K @ 3.50GHz 2,008 Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz 2,713 6C/12T Base 3.70 Max Turbo 4.70 GHz
But to bin the processors this way, the power usually goes up too. Modern "Turbo" limits are on the order of 224 Watts for example, on newer Intel items not in that sample set.
My newest build (within last month) is like this. The board will hold 128GB of DDR4 RAM max.
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 3,210 # SingleThreaded AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 20,032 # Multithreaded, 6C/12T, 65W
But many times, it doesn't feel that fast. Like in Linux when the non-accelerated driver is used for the built-in graphics.
When I tested Slackware64 beta 15 on it, the GLXGears ran at
22000 FPS on the Vega7 built-in GPU. (Since GLXGears does not scale linearly, and may saturate at high rates, this is *not* a benchmark. But it's easy to run.) In the desktop, that CPU draws 30-35W at idle. I don't have numbers for entire machine power. It draws exactly 65W on ATX12V when I run Prime95 on it (board uses a power limiter, it's probably not an accident that number popped out).But that build also cost too much. It came in over budget, because the processor I really wanted, was out of stock everywhere. That was bought more out of frustration than good planning.
Paul
Hmmm. I'm using FreeBSD and my BT headset worked first go (it's a Plantronics).
Using PulseAudio 13 (I know, I know), so I would suspect it's more an actual driver issue.
Thanks for the input Paul but I have to admit much goes over my head, do I take it that the I7s are different generations from their suffixes?
I was looking at a refurbished i7-6700 [Quad] 3.40GHz DVD DDR4 which is in my price bracket but falls near the bottom of your 3.
I should also mention I am interested in keeping electricity consumption low, my I5 uses about 35W with the screen off.
I had wondered about using a laptop and my 24" screen to reduce power consumption.
Some of the power saving on mine, comes from the so-called 7 nanometer geometry. A number of the Intel generations were 14nm.
i7 4C 8T or higher \ i5 4C 4T \___ Can only be compared across the same generation. i3 2C 2T / Intel makes very small changes between them.
At one time, Intel swore an oath they would not make any more dual core processors. But they're still doing it for the i3.
The clock rates are also modified, so it's not all "core count". My new processor for example, has low power but only 4.4GHz max clock. Other members using the same silicon can manage 5.1GHz but with more power consumption and a higher VCore. The silicon process PVT allows around a factor of seven, between the weakest SKUs and the strongest SKUs. Mine then, is a couple notches down from the top.
Laptop processors are quite expensive, for what you get.
Laptops are for portability. You pay the extra money, so you can carry the unit around to "take notes".
Historically, some of the low power SKUs were only available inside a Dell or an HP or a Lenovo, and could not be purchased at the computer store. The 5300G I wanted, cannot be purchased at the store. The
10105 I was looking for, was out of stock. The stock of the more expensive processors is better.THe cheapest processor Intel made, of relatively recent composition, was $17. It had a hardware limit imposed internally, of no more than 1GB of memory (the Win10 min). Normal processors are dual channel,
2x64 bits. The $17 processor had half a channel, 1x32 bits. It had four cores... at 1.2GHz or so. It didn't draw much power. It also didn't do too much. At some point, the quest for low power is pointless. I'm sure Puppy Linux would scream on it. *******The generations are addressed here.
Gen 6 through Gen 11, are on 14nm. But the 14nm has small refinements on a basic theme, so they're not all exactly the same 14nm layout.
Where a generation has an "architectural refinement", the IPC or instructions per clock could be slightly greater. Pairs of generations then, could have the same IPC. Eventually even the ability to squeeze out more IPC was coming to a halt (both AMD and Apple, know different). Thus an 11th gen 4GHz processor could be 10% faster than a 6th gen 4Ghz processor, and that difference is due to the IPC.
Some processors can retire four instructions in one tick, as a measure of internal parallelism in a single CPU core. In-order processors (Pentium III?) could retire one instruction per clock cycle. There isn't too much discussion about CPU architectures any more in newsgroups, so it's hard to keep all of it straight. Even though a processor can have such a "peak rate", the probability of four instructions retiring like that, is quite small. You might have to wait a couple years, for compilers to catch up with the innovations, and actually make code with that kind of parallelism put into it on purpose.
Of the 1000 instructions in the instruction set, around 300 are used, the other 700 sit there collecting dust. If you want to use the other 700 of them for fun, you drop to assembler to do it. While they do their best to test the 1000 instructions and prove they all work, people working at assembler level are the individuals most likely to discover flaws. The Prime95 guy for example, I think he uncovered AVX256 problems or such. I think he might have tried to use AVX for the FFTs he was doing, and there was too much noise and heat coming from the logic block. It was something like that. You'd have to look up the history of that one.
Paul
Ah but what about windows sound these days with those horrible drivers that clip off and on the sound at the start and end requiring you to use silencio to keep the audio alive, and of course the poor handling of different sound streams on Windows. I know nothing of Linus myself, but those who do use it seem to suggest its very much more fixable than Windows, but we have to stick with Microsoft as everyone uses it, except of course the cloud computers like Googles system. Brian
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