Understanding the lurkers

[SombreroMickey]

The reason why l´m still thinkin about preorder is dissapointment of "progress" compared with GPD ( ) and it looks that this second device will be at your home earlier than Pyra :/
Nowdays l´m thinking which of these are better for me (not player) (perfomance vs 4g modem)

 

[TrashyMG]

@SombreroMickey Well the Pyra project will be around long after the GPD Win/Pocket will be long replaced by what ever disposable device they come up with next in another year or so.

 

[Grench]

@SombreroMickey Well the Pyra project will be around long after the GPD Win/Pocket will be long replaced by what ever disposable device they come up with next in another year or so.

Not to be harsh, but please don't berate honest answers to the question/topic. I don't want anyone to feel like they can't honestly answer why they're a lurker/not purchaser/not. If you delete your post/reply, please drop this one too? Thank you!

 

[SombreroMickey]

Not to be harsh, but please don't berate honest answers to the question/topic. I don't want anyone to feel like they can't honestly answer why they're a lurker/not purchaser/not. If you delete your post/reply, please drop this one too? Thank you!

l dont feel, that somebody berate me for my opinion, actually my answer is little bit flame-like and its for wider conversation (probably not on this topic)

@SombreroMickey Well the Pyra project will be around long after the GPD Win/Pocket will be long replaced by what ever disposable device they come up with next in another year or so.

Yes, you are right, but its consumer item, and also everyear will be new/updated device with new CPU and larger RAM(GPD pocket will have 8GB rams, impressive ! ) . l thought that pyra will be hacking/working device - connect to monitor, using light-weight ide, little bit phone also, by the time - pyra is gonna have "same" cpu like my 4 years old mobile(q10) and as l could see it´s couldn´t be compared with nowdays Iphone, would it be fine for me ? l don´t know, l´m lack of videos and perfomance test for this setup. And also gpd pocket is cheap as fuck (but also without 4g modem and touch screen)

 

[levi]

That's a fair point, and one that I hope will be resolved soonish as developers make videos showing off what it can do. We've had plenty of impressive TI dev-board videos already, but actually showing it all running on the target hardware would bring people to the project.

I don't know how many of the current preorderers have a Pandora already, and we're well aware of the amazing things that can be done with a CPU that's got half the cores, a few less max MHz, and a much less efficient machine code, so have a lot to look forward to. It may only have the processor of your old phone, but having a full keyboard and gaming controls really opens up the possibilities.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Yes, you are right, but its consumer item, and also everyear will be new/updated device with new CPU and larger RAM(GPD pocket will have 8GB rams, impressive ! ) . l thought that pyra will be hacking/working device - connect to monitor, using light-weight ide, little bit phone also, by the time - pyra is gonna have "same" cpu like my 4 years old mobile(q10) and as l could see it´s couldn´t be compared with nowdays Iphone, would it be fine for me ? l don´t know, l´m lack of videos and perfomance test for this setup. And also gpd pocket is cheap as fuck (but also without 4g modem and touch screen)

The CPU and RAM are upgradeable, though, so the Pyra can improve as the available CPUs and RAM do.

 

[vcoleiro1]

And also gpd pocket is cheap as fuck (but also without 4g modem and touch screen)

The GPD Pocket does have a touchscreen - it's capacitive multi touch

 

[rygD]

I use ancient computers, sometimes (extremely rarely, usually "because I can") for real work. Not everyone has the same requirements as me, so it is good that there are other options, even if they aren't designed to be the base for possible future upgrades. Plus, unfortunately, some people just need Wintel.

 

[SombreroMickey]

The GPD Pocket does have a touchscreen - it's capacitive multi touch

Oh nice, fullhd touch

The CPU and RAM are upgradeable, though, so the Pyra can improve as the available CPUs and RAM do.

Yeah, that´s true, but to be honest, l dont think it´s the first think which will EvilDragon do after sale pyra. With all these fixes of motherboard it could take another 3 years for getting 3 years old cpu .

 

[levi]

Yeah, but in some ways I don't think it's such a bad thing if it takes three years or so to get a new CPU. It took about that long for Exo to learn enough NEON to make DraStic to emulate the Nintendo DS, and something like that for Lunixbochs to come up with a workable version of GLShim to bring OpenGL apps to Pandora, and a similar time for Ptitseb to get his porting chops in order to port all of those 3D games.

But maybe I'm being too pessimistic about all that. Ptitseb's porting environment shouldn't take that long to be adapted to a new ARM processor, and glshim is already portable (but there's more work to be done to make it support later versions of OpenGL that have more chance to running well on a dual core A15), and DraStic got ported to all kinds of ARM-based android phones within 12 months IIRC, so probably a lot of those 48 months or so to make these things was down to learning stuff that's useful on all kinds of processors.

But who knows what else there is to be discovered about the A15 processor, so having a stable target for a few years actually doesn't seem that bad to me, especially as a fan of old 8- and 16-bit computers which kept to very similar families of processors for 5 years or more and did quite amazing things by the end that none of us had expected to begin with.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Yeah, that´s true, but to be honest, l dont think it´s the first think which will EvilDragon do after sale pyra. With all these fixes of motherboard it could take another 3 years for getting 3 years old cpu .

Once a CPU is 3 years old though, it'll have better support and stuff, so that may be a good thing. and it's still an upgrade. Linux will go a lot further on these CPUs than Android will.

 

[SombreroMickey]

Once a CPU is 3 years old though, it'll have better support and stuff, so that may be a good thing. and it's still an upgrade. Linux will go a lot further on these CPUs than Android will.

Better support for CPU than X86_64 ? Rly. Now l´m talkin about obsolete cpu, not about device.

 

[Wally]

I think we need to arrange the rank of people under 20 posts to be a lurker

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Better support for CPU than X86_64 ? Rly. Now l´m talkin about obsolete cpu, not about device.

Define obsolete though. A CPU is only as obsolete as the newest device using it. Especially with these ARM chipsets, you end up with it taking a while to get open source support for things, so it's better to get it when it's been around a while and all the intricacies are understood.

 

[ZXDunny]

Not a lurker, but have not ordered a Pyra. And the GPD devices really have me on the fence as to whether or not to bother now.

I like Linux, I use it for work, for recreation, and of course on my Pandora. I love it for tinkering, for customising, that sort of thing. But god damn I hate developing on it or for it. Windows is just so much better for me. And now that the Pocket is coming out, if I get a small device at all, it will in all likelihood be that rather than the Pyra. But I'm not sure I even want a small device. The Pandora is enough - it runs PandaBAS by default on bootup now, and I very rarely boot into XFCE at all. I don't game on it anymore. It's become a glorified (but fun) calculator.

I guess I've changed.

 

[Wally]

Not a lurker, but have not ordered a Pyra. And the GPD devices really have me on the fence as to whether or not to bother now.

I like Linux, I use it for work, for recreation, and of course on my Pandora. I love it for tinkering, for customising, that sort of thing. But god damn I hate developing on it or for it. Windows is just so much better for me. And now that the Pocket is coming out, if I get a small device at all, it will in all likelihood be that rather than the Pyra. But I'm not sure I even want a small device. The Pandora is enough - it runs PandaBAS by default on bootup now, and I very rarely boot into XFCE at all. I don't game on it anymore. It's become a glorified (but fun) calculator.

I guess I've changed.

But But what about FMN!

 

[levi]

I like Linux, [snip]. But god damn I hate developing on it or for it. Windows is just so much better for me.

That's an unusual position to have. I guess if you're a big Visual Studio fan I could just about understand you, but the weird-ass (and slow) Windows make system, the Windows paging strategy, and slow NTFS drivers just about swore me off using windows for anything serious. Linux might be obtuse at times, but once you've learned something, it's consistently applied, whereas in windows 10 I couldn't even edit a batch file in an installed app, despite being logged in as admin, and the file not being marked read-only, and the directory being writable. Somehow, in the end I managed to break that program entirely somehow and I had to reinstall it, so I still haven't been able to fix that bug.

 

[kabaiakh]

Yeah, but in some ways I don't think it's such a bad thing if it takes three years or so to get a new CPU. It took about that long for Exo to learn enough NEON to make DraStic to emulate the Nintendo DS, and something like that for Lunixbochs to come up with a workable version of GLShim to bring OpenGL apps to Pandora, and a similar time for Ptitseb to get his porting chops in order to port all of those 3D games.

But maybe I'm being too pessimistic about all that. Ptitseb's porting environment shouldn't take that long to be adapted to a new ARM processor, and glshim is already portable (but there's more work to be done to make it support later versions of OpenGL that have more chance to running well on a dual core A15), and DraStic got ported to all kinds of ARM-based android phones within 12 months IIRC, so probably a lot of those 48 months or so to make these things was down to learning stuff that's useful on all kinds of processors.

You are not pessimistic.
You are an optimist ... w/ XP. ;=)

Mastering hardware /via/ software consumes time, sadly.
It seems to me the productive forces from the P(ando|y)ra community has no monopoly over this.

IIRC, PS2 developpers didn't tame quickly the EmotionEngine and its co-chips back in the days;
even with large amount of ressources in terms of money && brilliant-yet-unknown brains.
I guess other examples could be mentioned.

Good things come to those who wait, don't they ?

 

[FBnil]

Nah, @ZXDunny has a point. my old ELF's do not work, basically, you have a different system each time. Hopefully you have LSB but even then, the libraries could not be there, or incompatible. You want a GUI? Well, GTK will have weird bugs but maybe you can get something working on it. QT is nice, but if you want some basic features beyond a button... it's not programmed. You need to spawn a browser? Good luck with running the default, which usually is not Firefox, but something meh. Need to deploy it? RPM? hopefully Alien can make a DEB out of it. Else you need a make/scons/automake and a gcc... but guess what? There is no GCC on a normal Linux desktop machine. Ask Loki Games... they just repackaged everything just in case it was not on the destination machine.

As for developing. I discovered Code this year. Nifty little editor with hinting and tons of plugins (it allows me to connect to an MSSQL database and query/view/dump the table content in minutes). It is even so good... it runs on Linux. (but read the license and privacy statement first... it will put you off)

https://code.visualstudio.com/

I like Lazarus a lot too, although I left pascal a long time ago.

As for what IDE's people are using at the moment: http://pypl.github.io/IDE.html

Even stuff like Sublime is not used very much, surprising!

 

[Letalis Sonus]

That's an unusual position to have.

I'd say people are throwing development and distribution into the same bucket. As far as development itself is concerned I do like Linux very much, I'm usually even using MinGW as a cross-compiler when I'm developing something for Windows to avoid having to work on it.