
Dell/Alienware release Ubuntu gaming desktop - onosendai
http://alienware.com/ubuntu/
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notatoad
This seems like the sort of thing where they don't really care whether they
sell any or not. Gaming on Ubuntu is a hot blog topic right now, so they took
an existing product and put Ubuntu on it. Probably cost a couple thousand to
do all the paperwork surrounding a new SKU, and they'll probably sell enough
of these to make cover that. Boom, Free marketing and some cred with the indie
gaming & Linux community. And if Steam on Linux does take off, they've already
got their foot in the door.

It's kind of awesome that we're at a place where releasing a Ubuntu desktop is
a matter of "why not?" Rather than "why?"

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kayoone
Agreed, this probably was a minimal cost compared to the positive publicity
among the tech crowd. I hope Dell is going to be more innovative in the future
and tries a few things as they are no public company anymore, i guess this can
only help in the long term.

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macco
In my oppinion Ubuntu give Dell the opportunity to differentiate from the
market. A good idea would be exklusive Ubuntu machines.

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jiggy2011
Surely it would make sense to at least offer a dual boot option?

I can't really think of a solid reason for buying this, Steam on Linux is
great and all but when your marketing is saying "With over 25 gaming titles
available"..

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MacsHeadroom
Wine can run most popular games surprisingly well these days. Many even run
better than they do under Windows.

~~~
bytefactory
That's interesting, I didn't know that! That makes the option of using an HTPC
as a 'true' gaming platform (in addition to being a media center) a lot more
likely.

Do most of the recent games (Need for Speed, Counter Strike : Source, Far Cry
3, Assassin's Creed 3) run well, or is it mostly older games?

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jiggy2011
CS:S has a native Linux version that runs very well! Assassins creed 3 has
"garbage" rating on WineHQ (<http://appdb.winehq.org/>) and Far Cry 3 has
"silver". So the answer for those is probably no.

Not sure about NFS, guess it depends which one.

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neya
This is interesting, but not compelling.

I want:

1) Better video drivers.

2) An option to Dual-boot with another OS.

3) To remove the painful Unity interface.

4) More titles to play.

And then I would buy this without a second thought.

With just Ubuntu, with very little games with mediocre Graphic card drivers
and a painful interface like unity (try hiding/unhiding/switching between
hidden windows for example) it's hard to convince myself to buy this..

~~~
jiggy2011
Unity is probably the most intuitive system for somebody switching from Win7.

What else would you install by default? Gnome2/MATE/Xfce are showing their
age. Gnome3 is even stranger. The only other plausible choice would be KDE.

Unity is actually pretty good as an entertainment oriented interface. The
ability to search games, apps, music and movies all from the main menu is very
nice.

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sepbot
I have tried getting used to Unity, but I just can't.

It all comes down to the fact that the Unity launcher is forcibly placed on
the right hand side and I always accidentally click on it when trying to click
somewhere in the region. No other OS I use forces such a thing, which is why I
will never get used to it.

I tried changing my mouse sensitivity to compensate for the bar, but it makes
everything else harder. There used to be a hack that would let you move the
bar to the bottom of the screen, but it has not worked in the 12.x versions.

I use KDE these days. The worse thing they force their users to look at is the
Cashew, which can be made transparent by installing a third party widget.

~~~
keithpeter
" _It all comes down to the fact that the Unity launcher is forcibly placed on
the right hand side and I always accidentally click on it when trying to click
somewhere in the region._ "

Just hide the thing and press the Windows key and type? I used dwm/dmenu for a
year or so and never missed having a panel at all!

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darxius
Nice to see a big name company is doing this. It will surely help Linux
adoption by a wider array of users.

On another note, anyone else get that floating ad? Horribly placed and very
annoying.

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Apocryphon
Window 8 has really gotten the OEMs running scared.

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TsiCClawOfLight
Not my usecase at all, but really awesome for this to exist IMO.

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mkeung
like help get better video drivers to linux faster

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TsiCClawOfLight
I just hope they don't partner too closely with canonical.

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ihsw
Your concern is touching but unnecessary, Canonical has a rich history of
interoperability and openness with the community.

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TsiCClawOfLight
like with mir, and amazon search... I get it, thanks.

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pestaa
Okay, I very much dislike them too, but being afraid of a partnership with a
hardware monopoly based on two mistakes is a bit of a stretch.

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dbecker
I don't know anything about gaming. But I assume that means it has a great GPU
as well as a solid CPU... in which case this might be a good option for those
of us doing scientific computing.

~~~
TheEskimo
Well, the "Featured Systems" tab conveniently lists the GPU. It happens to be
a GeForce GTX 645 on the cheap end and a GTX 660 on the high end. A 660 costs
roughly $200. In addition, if your 'scientific computing' includes hashing or
any of a number of other things, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an
AMD card.

Overall, it's slightly overpriced. In addition, OEM hardware is invariably
uncustomizable (no extra PCI-E slots, lowest end power supply possible). If
you wanted to do scientific computing then there would be _much_ more
efficient options. This is no better an option (and probably worse) than other
run of the mill OEM hardware. I especially like how your comment began with "I
don't know anything about <related topic>. But...".

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Glyptodon
I have a hard time believing these will have much of a market.

Maybe Dell's just trying to get the jump on Valve's own Steambox?

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reactor
I think it looks promising if you have an external monitor and considering to
buy the box alone for your dev/day-to-day purpose, more like an alternative to
desktop. You get 1 TB additional for 50 bucks as well.

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liljimmytables
It's a nifty form factor and a reasonable graphics card, I would consider
getting one as a portable VR station for use with the Oculus Rift (whenever,
uh, you know, Oculus release the linux SDK).

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codebeard
Too bad the hardware is overpriced... Reflects bad on Ubuntu.

~~~
TsiCClawOfLight
It's actually pretty expensive to build that powerful of a system in that
format.

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icegreentea
This is the crucial point. For the performance specs, the X51 is somewhat
overpriced, even if you take into the account usual cut of a distributor.
However, given it's form factor (it's basically the size of a game console),
it's actually amazingly priced.

~~~
TsiCClawOfLight
My thoughts exactly. I don't think it's even possible to beat this by
yourself, and I'm certainly the demographic that would try.

~~~
tracker1
I spent about the price of the low end to upgrade my desktop to a AMD's
current top 8-core... that doesn't include re-using my video card, case and
hard drives. It's not a bad option at all. May actually get a couple of the
lower end ones, as both my grandmothers are due for an update, and one of them
needs to get away from windows (too much crapware gets installed).

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AmVess
High price/low spec. No thanks.

The $300 Windows RT 32GB tab offer cracks me up, though.

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jcr
<http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx>

> _Equipped with the new NVIDIA® GTX 645 graphics card_

Don't bother. They want you to use proprietary driver blobs without any source
code for them.

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xentronium
What stops you from using nouveau drivers?

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jcr
To do hardware accelerated 3D with nouveau, you need the to use the
experimental nouveau mesa driver. It kind of works for some situations, but it
still unstable and incomplete. You can find details here:

<http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/MesaDrivers>

At present, nouveau is only working in a handful of linux distributions (with
or without experimental hardware accelerated 3D support). All of the other
UNIX-like systems are presently unable to run nouveau (e.g. all of the BSD's)

The most important issue is actually the wasted developer time. Countless
hours of developer time have been wasted in the attempt to reverse engineer
the proprietary binary nVidia drivers for the sake of recreating their
functionality in the open source nouveau driver. If nVidia wants the business
and support of open source developers and users, then they should provide all
of the required specs and documentation for their hardware needed to write
open source drivers.

~~~
xentronium
In the meantime, is there any ideologically better proposition suitable for
gaming?

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jcr
Whether open source is a use-case or an ideology really depends on the
requirements of the individual or organization. Some work in a world where
security auditing of all source code is required, or source code is required
to maintain compatibility, but of course, others are free from these
restrictions and are willing to closed source binaries.

If you're under no requirement restrictions, then calling the insistence on
open source code an ideology or preference is entirely fair.

If your only goal is to just play as many different games as possible, then
using linux is a bad choice from the start, and you're obviously intending on
running closed source code, so requirements and preferences make no difference
to you.

If you hope to run as much open source as possible, then buying hardware from
friendly vendors is your best bet. Your choices for both modern and supported
graphics hardware with open source support are pretty much limited to Intel
and AMD/ATI.

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ndrake
I wonder how loud it'll be.

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jjkmk
I own an alienware in that config and it's dead quiet.

