Ever considered Linux?

Not worth the price though, get an FX8350 and use the extra money for a nice fancy monitor.

Intels 8 cores are expensive, yes fair enough their FOSS drivers are good, but not worth the asking price, X99 is for gamers and maybe some video editors who want a more consumer platform, but me personally if i wanted 8 core I would go AMD or Xeon, budget dependant, also remember you need good storage to help with VMs, hard drive hammering is common among drives, which adds a small amount to the budget.

X99 is simply not cost effective for Linux VMs, more so for gaming, Gaming is not yet 8 core optimized outside of BF4, and that was so EA could boast like bitches as per, most games cant even use 4 propperly, then add in Linux kernel optimizations and well, Pentium G dual cores will do fine with a sub £200 AMD card, passthrough with VM then fake VM specs to fake 8 cores, done and dusted.

I see where your coming from but as shown emulation is becoming locked out on consumer platforms, and I feel on some motherboard VT-d will be locked.

Shame though, would love to rock one of them 8 cores on FOSS drivers, let the good times roll!

i don't know about games, but x99 to me would be about kvm

octocore with multiple gpus. also add nics and use drives natively  -- means you could run windows and linux simultaneously and not tell which one was metal and which one was a guest. you can do that now, but 8 cores at that price.. maybe..

Are you saying that the OS has nothing to do with the general performance of a computer, but only the applications? That's a strange statement to make.

Oh, and I totally agree about your second  point, Windows is more user friendly than linux, and I would never want that to change. If consumers want software that you install by clicking on a few boxes, and then you get Internet Explorer to get on the web, then Windows is perfect for them.

Have you tried a distro other than Ubuntu or Mint? You'd be surprised very different they can be.

I agree, when you work on something you don't really want to go home and work on that as well. I agree the market isn't there for Linux yet but it is showing signs here and there. For me I have Debian installed on one SSD and Windows on another. I play mostly on Windows and use Linux for work. 

Not actually, for example Faster then Light (The Spaceship rouge game.) has Steam cloud but the configs/saves are a different format and don't work on a Windows or Linux partnership. Unsure if that has changed recently or not. I have seen this with Windows, OS X, and Linux.

I'm referring to windows as a desktop OS. I'm aware that it's kinda pointless to try to run Windows on mainframes.

I don't think you understand my point that it's really not the underlying OS that matters when considering overall performance but rather the applications that run on that OS. As per Amdahl's law, to improve the performance of a system efficiently, I should look for the largest resource consumer on the system. It doesn't matter if my OS uses 256MB or 1024MB if the application I need to run uses 2.2GB. If another OS uses 128MB less ram to do the same thing, that still doesn't change my focus of where I should try to improve the performance of the system.

None of the ideologically for using Linux over Windows, OS/X, iOS is actually visible or actually relevant to most people and that's what most of your post was.

You're right that one of the major appeals of linux derivs is to be able to modify it and that is at the exact same time it's greatest weakness because it means the devs expect the users to do so as a desktop OS and not every user wants to do that. “Can I just get this thing to work or do I have to compile it myself?” I find myself asking constantly. For hours on end.

“If you learn how to use open source tools like cutlery and pots and pans, and learn how to make fire, you can cook your own meals, and eat as much good food as you want.” Or I could outsource the food production and get to work doing other things like going to work, using applications and contributing to society in general instead of spending significant portions of my time worrying about cooking or other mundane matters like using an OS. As a user, what practical purpose is there in compiling my own software over using pre-compiled binaries besides ideology? Imagine trying to explain the merits of doing so to someone who just purchased a DRM laced Bluray movie. They just want the darn thing to work. That's true for both the pieces of plastic people buy and the platforms that we use to run our applications. It's the applications that matter, not the OS.

+1

 

Although the hate I feel from this post for Windows I don't completely agree with. (IE Windows being a pain with drivers/updates/etc) I have had issues with Linux as well. AMD/ATI graphics drivers, updates, installs that go awry. But what Windows and Linux have done is support a wide range of hardware and configurations. Linux gives you full total complete control. That's both good and bad in some cases. Sorry OS X you're made for just a few pieces of hardware. You, OS X are stable though, for the most part.

I'm saying the OS has comparatively less impact on performance than other factors to take into account like applications, slow hardware in general and people overloading it. 

My favorite distro so far is CentOS. It's basically a dump of the red-hat linux code so they can maintain their gpl licencing. It's much easier to use than the ubuntu server I tried, used almost no resources and it didn't encourage messing with it too much (this is a good thing on a real server platform where stability matters). I'd prefer Ubuntu CLI server tho if I was going to actually run one due to high availability of debian packages overall, but that's more home-server level. <3 linux server platforms. For non-WDS/AD servers anyway.

For desktop level linux, peachOS was awesome before it died; although it wasn't too reliable for the short time it was around, but awesome. Any desktop-level linux distro you could recommend that wouldn't yell at me for running as root and modifying permissions I shouldn't be modifying?

I've been using linux on the destkop for less than a year, I have a feeling that you have more experience with it than me. I also don't work (yet) in an IT field like you.

I've tried different distros, but I've always had Arch Linux installed. You're going to have to get down and dirty with it though, and there's absolutely no hand holding involved (not even a graphical installer).

There's no compiling involved, as far as I can tell. You can use pacaur to compile the applications from the AUR (Arch User Repository), just like you would use a regular package manager (like sudo apt-get install).

Another extremely user friendly (but not dumbed down) distro is Manjaro. It is awesome, and one of the most rapidly growing distros out there.

CentOS is one of favorites too, probably because I'm familiar with yum from Fedora at work. I don't know then again aptitude is easy.. you can use any... maybe I just like it cause CentOS was the first distro I tried, nostalgic factor. My mom is a computer "rah-tard" and I tosses eOS on her laptop and she has been using that everyday for like a year no problems soooo if I had to recommend a friendly desktop experience, probably that haha.

Yea after your post I did a quick search. Not much out there for gaming setups but found this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37D2bRsthfI

 

I don't think X99 will significantly increase Wine performance, I do however still love Linux the way it is <3