rookiejet22

The Morning Stream (http://frogpants.com/tms) is a particularly good podcast, although the subject matter does not usually contain any programming or indeed tech related material. The banter, and chemistry between the show's co-hosts, and the interesting assortment of trivia that is often on stock brightens my mornings, and the time that I spend on drudge work. I usually listen to silence, or music with no lyrics, mostly jazz and electronica when I have to concentrate on the task at hand. Podcasts are a huge distraction vector for me personally, or at least were till I banned them from my assigned work hours. Nonetheless `The Morning Stream' is highly recommended.

I could not edit, so I will reply instead. If you work from the terminal I find that prefixing commands with a ``ionice'' priority settings helps keep IO hogs from slowing the desktop.

I am going to take a wild guess and say the sluggishness you are encountering is caused by the IO scheduler. It's the main cause of sluggishness on my desktop. In fact it's choking /right now/ as I type this due to a large file copy process in the background. BFQ, the other desktop scheduler for linux, is not included in the default kernel, and in my use has not fared any better.

GEM/KMS has already been ported. The code in the BETAs has worked on my machines. It looks likely to be available in the next release. htop is written for Linux. It only works on FreeBSD due to Linux procfs emulation.

I agree. Unless there is a significant push by OEMs, the Linux desktop will never see wide adoption. I wonder what were the reasons for Dell pulling their Ubuntu based options in the US? Inability to provide support, or was it a push by its main OS provider.

IMO Ubuntu is poised to make a serious dent in the desktop market share. Maybe next year is finally going to be the year of the Linux desktop :).