
Mark Shuttleworth sees increased demand for enterprise Ubuntu Linux desktop - CrankyBear
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mark-shuttleworth-sees-increased-demand-for-enterprise-ubuntu-linux-desktop/
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gonyea
It's amazing that Apple seems to be holding on to their grudge against
Nvidia... to their own detriment.

You haven't been able to buy a Mac/Macbook Pro with an Nvidia chip for many
years now, and using one in an external enclosure is iffy. So data scientists
are increasingly using Linux to do their work.

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CoolGuySteve
Are the embedded NVidia chips really that great for DL? I have a GeForce 150
in my laptop that I keep permanently disabled in Linux to save a couple watts
of power. Aside from the GPU generally being weak, my battery would only last
for a couple hours if I cranked my CPU/GPU near 100% usage vs 10 hours just
editing files via wifi.

Almost all my work requiring a GPU is done by either ssh'ing into my desktop
with a GTX 1080 or on AWS. And in that scenario, Linux has less friction (I
can migrate setups between home and AWS) and is significantly cheaper than a
MacPro.

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mark_l_watson
I have a System76 Linux laptop with a 1070 and it works fine for deep
learning. I used to SSH into cloud services but decided having a GPU always
available locally was worth a little money.

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twa927
> "Previously, those were kind of off the books, under the table. You know,
> 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But now suddenly, it's the AI team and
> they've got to be supported."

Are AI devs (Data Scientists?) really regarded that much higher by the
management compared to the regular devs?

Do you think this is special or is it just the current fad that is large
enough to reach the management?

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geodel
Yes I think so. At our place all data scientist/big data types are given high
end MBPs and >2 good quality 4K monitors. All other typical IT devs are given
a low-end 15W HP laptop and 2 HD monitors again from HP. Low quality Windows
machines have been mandated right from top IT leadership. So I think data
scientists are important enough if they can override or get exception to
standard issue hardware/software.

~~~
twa927
That's interesting, I'm wondering if this happens also to e.g. "Cloud
Specialists" or happened to "Object Orientation Specialists" 20 years ago...

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geodel
Maybe. But I think it is mainly due to expensive ass consultants selling
management the idea of deriving deep insights out of terabytes of application
logs. And since it is about big data so big hardware seems natural to
management. Regarding OO Specialists I remember in J2EE heydays stodgy
Weblogic/Websphere tools would take 2GB RAM when 256MB was more of standard.
So management would approve this configuration for important enterprise
projects done in J2EE.

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AdmiralAsshat
>While some users still miss the now-deprecated Unity interface, the GNOME 3
desktop interface has won fans. Indeed, Shuttleworth said, "GNOME kind of
saved my bacon, to be honest. Unity was causing a lot of distractions and it
was controversial, even though it was good. So, when we decided to retire it,
we needed a desktop, and that was GNOME"

This is pleasantly surprising to read. Many were happy to see Canonical drop
their homegrown Unity for GNOME, and GNOME has received quite a few
performance improvements from Ubuntu devs as a result.

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jamestanderson
Can anyone shed some light into why specifically AI developers prefer using
Linux over MacOS? I realize the tradeoffs and preferences between Mac and
Linux, but this article calls out AI devs specifically, and I wasn't sure the
reason for that.

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spamizbad
I've been a developer on all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
Just my opinion, but I feel these days Linux has the best "developer
ergonomics" for backend and systems development.

Granted, I think if you're building native mobile apps and web front-ends,
your life is easier on a Mac just by virtue of having access to the same
tooling as your design team. But for everything else, it just feels _easier_
to get stuff done on Linux.

Complicating matters is the declining quality of Apple Macbook Pros and their
propensity to thermally throttle. They are quite beautiful though! Still, as a
2018 15" MBP user at work, I often regret not getting a T or P-series Lenovo
which carry with them their own flaws.

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sampo
> I often regret not getting a T or P-series Lenovo

There is also the X1 Extreme.

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xur17
I currently have the regular X1, but am seriously considering the X1 Extreme
as my next laptop. 32gb of ram in a dev machine would be amazing.

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noir_lord
My T470P from 2017 has 32GB of RAM (Came with 1x16 and I put the other 16 in
myself) and it's great.

Can in a pinch do everything on the laptop I can do on my dev desktops.

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teekert
I'm a bioinformatician/data scientist and I'd really love to run Ubuntu on my
laptop but I have to use Windows, company policy.

Tbh I'd miss Teams and Outlook (though both are well supported in the
browser), I avoid Excel like the plaque anyway because it messes with gene
names (sept1 anyone?) and Word/PowerPoint is also ok in the cloud (though the
latter gets tedious with animations and complex slides I find).

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Scarbutt
What is your Excel replacement?

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teekert
Python 3 Pandas in Jupyter-lab mostly. But before that I used Origin (it's a a
paid product and does not really scale).

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ryanmarsh
This site pegged my i9 and spun the fan up. I tried profiling the site,
there's tons of garbage and errors in the console and looks like most of the
CPU is spent in Teads' code which is some kind of marketing platform.

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jlgaddis
Welcome to the modern web!

I highly recommend uBlock Origin [0].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin)

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coldpie
Also NoScript.

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CameronNemo
uMatrix anyone?

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burtonator
Told you. I've been telling you guys for the last ten years that this year is
going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.

When are you going to believe me!

