2011-08-02, 17:19
@LB06:
The beauty of having a remote with a mini keyboard and touchpad available, (the fantastic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003VAVC26), is that I can, if I want, run a vncviewer to control a virtual session on a server, or chromium-browser to check something, or audacious or vlc if I want their features, or audacity to record from the USB-attached turntable, or pop up a terminal window to pull from git and re-build xbmc if I don't feel like getting up off the couch to go to another machine from which to ssh or vnc into the machine. Even sometimes, I just exit xbmc and launch boxee. Why not run the desktop? The machine has the horsepower... Now, I will grant you, Lubuntu or XUbuntu might be a better (lighter) choice...
On choosing between them it would be hard for me to care about the 12 watts based on electricity cost, but, I would extrapolate that it makes the machine that much hotter and/or louder in general, keep this in mind...
On the AMD support issue, my understanding is that it isn't totally clear-cut who is better, NVidia writes better Linux drivers, but AMD I think publishes more information for open source driver writers, who just haven't come forth yet with comparative drivers.
@pingadam:
The truth, for me, is that I would never personally use either of these machines as a general purpose server machine, they both are too underpowered, and don't have enough expansion options... my media lives on an E8400 Core 2 Duo 3GHz, 8Gig RAM, 10TB RAID-5, which averages only 75 watts - ish, that is up 24/7... But, I can see it might be a toss up if you don't care about the HD playback issues. I'm not kidding when I say I like the green circle better, and I respect the 12 watt difference, and it works fine under Linux.
The beauty of having a remote with a mini keyboard and touchpad available, (the fantastic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003VAVC26), is that I can, if I want, run a vncviewer to control a virtual session on a server, or chromium-browser to check something, or audacious or vlc if I want their features, or audacity to record from the USB-attached turntable, or pop up a terminal window to pull from git and re-build xbmc if I don't feel like getting up off the couch to go to another machine from which to ssh or vnc into the machine. Even sometimes, I just exit xbmc and launch boxee. Why not run the desktop? The machine has the horsepower... Now, I will grant you, Lubuntu or XUbuntu might be a better (lighter) choice...
On choosing between them it would be hard for me to care about the 12 watts based on electricity cost, but, I would extrapolate that it makes the machine that much hotter and/or louder in general, keep this in mind...
On the AMD support issue, my understanding is that it isn't totally clear-cut who is better, NVidia writes better Linux drivers, but AMD I think publishes more information for open source driver writers, who just haven't come forth yet with comparative drivers.
@pingadam:
The truth, for me, is that I would never personally use either of these machines as a general purpose server machine, they both are too underpowered, and don't have enough expansion options... my media lives on an E8400 Core 2 Duo 3GHz, 8Gig RAM, 10TB RAID-5, which averages only 75 watts - ish, that is up 24/7... But, I can see it might be a toss up if you don't care about the HD playback issues. I'm not kidding when I say I like the green circle better, and I respect the 12 watt difference, and it works fine under Linux.