[Nottingham] New PC

[Daryl]

I may have mentioned at the last meet that I was expecting delivery of the
bits to make a new PC.

Well, I'm now in possession of a very nice AMD Ryzen 7 1700 based machine.
With one of my stated goals being running Linux on it and doing 100% of my
work on it I can report some great success! It dual boots Windows 10, but
everything I need/use has Linux versions.

I went with Ubuntu 17.10 running proper Gnome 3. Reasoning? I wanted the
highest availability of pre-built packages and ease of setup. I considered
Fedora and openSUSE too.

The only issues I've experienced are very typical Linux ones:

1. My USB wireless dongle needed some tweaking and extra packages to get to
work.
2. The font in LibreOffice doesn't display if I tweak the standard theme
fonts. I get boxes rather than letters. I've noticed a few fonts preview
like this generally so I need to look further. Still not fixed this.
3. Took a little time to get anti-aliasing and fonts looking good compared
to Windows. Windows tends to favour legibility over accuracy.

Performance is incredible. Build and run times for my java app have dropped
from 90-120 seconds on my SurfaceBook to around 12. The same build
environment on Windows 10 on this same PC takes around 28 seconds so a win
for open source!

I have to integrate with the evil empire, but Office365 in a browser solves
that mostly but I'm using Hiri for Office365 e-mail. I've also got OneDrive
syncing successfully.

So, for the first time in many years I'm back to 100% native Linux for
work. Games are forcing me to dual boot though...I love retro games and
NEED to play System Shock 2!

Daryl.
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