Seeking Alternative to Windows OS
Wanderer
Posts: 957
Hi all,
I'm building a new computer to replace my aging Win 7 desktop, but I really would prefer to leave Microsoft behind without sacrificing my Daz library or Daz 3d if possible. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding something that will actually work with the latest Nvidia cards and be able to get full use of their capabilities? I've always been a Windows user, but their obtuseness of the last 4 years has caused me to seriously consider other options before they cut the 7 branch loose. I would just cut all ties to the internet apart from my cell phone, but losing things like connection to Daz will be problematic. If you don't have an OS suggestion, I'm willing to consider all advice concerning a way forward that breaks the MS hold on my life. I've already purchased the hardware, and I'm waiting for it to arrive, so some options are already out I imagine. I plan to continue using my Win 7 machine for writing as long as possible while waiting for renders to finish on the newer machine.
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Comments
I'd considered Linux, but it looks like the people in the Linux thread struggle just to get Daz functional. And I really don't think of Mac as an option, but I really don't know Mac apart from hating anything that fails to allow left and right mouse clicks (maybe I'm just dating myself now since I've no idea what it's like today).
There really are only 2 options besides Win.
Linux which has the issues you're aware of.
Mac isn't really an option, at least for the near term, because the most recent MacOS has ended support for all Nvidia cards.
Your best option is to just upgrade to Win 10. I keep encountering people who have some issue going from 7 to 10. This makes no sense. Staying with 7 while the launch issues got shook out made some sense. Now? Win 10 is not just a very mature OS MS has said therte will never be another major Win version. So once you're on Win 10 you'll have a stable platform for years.
If you do go to W10 get the Pro version. It's the one I have and thus far I haven't had any problems with it. I went from W7 to W10, and was very worried after reading all the horror stories, but I think the most problems are with the Home version. The Pro version lets the user have alot more control over the OS, including the dreaded "feature" updates.
Thank you both, @kenshaw011267 and @zombietaggerung, for your insights. I appreciate learning about your points of view. Perhaps it is silly, but one of my major issues came out of the decision to pull homegroups in Windows 10. I have a LAN that worked perfectly well, one Win 7 Ultimate machine, 2-3 Win 10 machines. Ever since they pulled support for homegroups I've had no end of issues trying to simply share regular files. I don't want to put them on One Drive, and it irritates me that what was once simple is now made hard--and why? I know, security and such, but honestly, that wasn't a concern for me because I was keeping AV progs updated and firewalls on. Had both hard and soft defenses. Going to the MS support article after the update did/does not solve the issue for me, so I usually just slap a usb drive in (I can use google/dropbox/whatever--which is like one drive anyway, but I don't trust the cloud completely) and do it that way--but then, why did I spend all that money to build a LAN in the first place? It isn't just for games, though for the most part those seem to work just fine. As a result of that decision, and a lot of others over the years (like the way they kind of forced Win 10 on some folks), I'd really rather leave. I have concerns about trust with MS, all things considered. I used to think of my network as a safe family space, but increasingly the powers that be seem intent on forcing us into the cloud, which I don't think is all that secure.
Anyway, after reading your responses, I probably will upgrade to the better version of 10 after all. If you can't beat 'em, and all that.
Thanks again.
If anyone else has any suggestions, I'm all ears/eyes (thumbs, too, unfortunately).
Unfortunately, there are only really 3 desktop operating systems to choose from. Mac won't support NVidia, and if you've had problems dealing with the loss of Home Groups, Linux will send you to an asylum. Everything is complex and assumes you already know a lot about Linux. I was trying to set up a simple tool today, and had to google it for half an hour and "read between the lines" to get it working. All the easy-to-find advice was "just do this in the usual way" which didn't help me much since I didn't know the usual way. That's what I was looking for!
As far as Home Groups, yeah Microsoft does this kind of thing periodically and it's certainly annoying as hell when they sunset some feature you loved. But all the other tech giants do it too.
One option: just use the old workgroups functionality. It's still there and it still works. If all you want to do is share drives & files, it's mostly good enough.
I've found another hack that has worked well for me when it comes to shared resources without using the cloud, and that is Android! I have a small set-top box computer which cost about $80 and runs Android. Plugging a large hard drive into it and running a Samba app gets me a simple file server that any computer on my network can access and save files to. It only works in the house, but at least I've still got control of my own bits. And with the Android app store available, getting this all set up was far easier than struggling over Linux's brutal learning curve - at least for me.
"it's mostly good enough"
Actually, Jim, I think that its probably better. I have never used the Homegroups myself, since I had always used Workgroups on my old NT machines and was familiar with the setup. There are certainly better security options with Workgroups. It just isn't a one-click solution, but a basic configuration isn't all that difficult.
Amongst the options that I am considering (despite the fact that I have three licensed, activated copies of W10 already loaded on spare drives, one for each of my W7 machines), is sandboxing one of the machines to address any security concerns, and/or creating a dual boot configuration with Windows 7 and perhaps some flavour of Linux. The Windows partition would be properly password-protected and be firewalled against internet access to address security concerns. The downside of this approach vis-a-vis DAZ Studio (for me, since I don't use either DIM or Connect anyway) would be that sooner or later support for W7 with some new version of Studio would no longer exist, at which point I would be stuck with an older version. But really, for me, this isn't that big a deal. As long as I can use my content, I'm good. I could run into issues at some point with hardware and driver support, but I'll just need to cross that bridge when I come to it.
I may end up firing up one of those copies of W10 on one of the machines, but, after having installed and configured it three times, and attempting to make it do what I need it to do with only modest success at best, I'm not enthusiastic. To quote the movie, I'm disenchanted with a company that essentially tells me, "when we want your opinion, we'll give it to you".
Homegroups and Workgroups are essentially the same thing and both are completely unneeded for a small home network, I have 3 PC's here, my primary desktop, one in the living room for streaming videos and playing games on the big screen and a NAS. Setting up file sharing between Windows machines is really easy, for a simple level of use. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the file or drive you wantto share, Right click it, select give access to and fill out the dialog. If all you want is to be able to share that directory or drive with everyone on the network it should be simply a matter of selecting "share this folder" and accepting the defaults. It does get more involved if you want to restrict which users can access the folder but not much.
I will say that from an ease of use perspective unless you really will have times when there will be a person sitting in front of every PC you're going to be far better off setting up a single file server, a NAS even if you don't use a NAS OS or a special chassis. It streamlines backups, if you know all your really important data is on one machine it is much easier to make sure a backup regime works properly. Also you don't need serious storage on every machine. Both my PC's that actually get used directly have m.2 boot drives and no other storage. The NAS has a bunch of storage, for games, movies, music and my 3d assets. Loading times are a little longer, my network is 1 Gbit versus the 6Gbit that SATA provides but streaming movies works smoothly and I think there are 2 games that I play with any frequency that have annoyingly long loading times and I have doubts how much that would be improved if the data was local.
Modern Mac mice know left vs right clicks based on the position of your finger on it. You can always get a third-party three button mouse. Or, hold down Control while you do a normal click.
As others have said, Mac and nVidia are really oil and water. If you need a GPU solution, you're rather stuck.
Also, ask yourself what will you use the computer for. Will 3D also be just for secondary tasks and would a CPU renderer be good enough?
As a Mac user, I've now moved on from Daz due to having no GPU solution amongst many other issues. Also, I don't do 3D work as my primary job. I love the Mac for software development, Photoshop, etc. And I now use Cinema4D which gives me a GPU solution.
Furthermore, both Octane and RedShift will have AMD solutions as well. Maxon aquired RedShift so there is already some nice integration with C4D.
If Daz would have committed to having a GPU solution for both nVidia and AMD, I may have stuck with them.
Wow, thanks for the input. I appreciate you all chiming in. I clearly have much to learn. Of particular interest is the idea of setting up one file server for every machine to access. My scenario is that I currently have one work machine, one play machine, and one machine that does a little this and that depending on who's on it. There are times when I'm working on my Win 7 while two of my kids are playing with each other on other devices. The new machine I'm building will need to serve for production--rendering while I'm doing other work on the 7. If one of my kids makes a mod and wants to store the file where other devices can easily download it for use or editing on their machines, I just want it to be a simple solution.
Mostly I was looking for an alternative to upgrading to 10 and sidetracked a bit into complaining about MS, but since a couple of you have mentioned the file serving option, I'm now also going to look into that. Frankly, it was irritating to no end to have a single update remove functionality from my network that I'd relied upon for years. It reminded me of the time years earlier when moving from Win XP cost me the easy use of my Panasonic CF-08 as a remote point of access, which reminded me of the loss of control I experienced when moving from Win 3.1 to 95/98. Sure, each time something huge was gained, but each time something specific I utilized was lost. Work-arounds? Oh, there's almost always a work-around, but each of us must decide how much time and energy any specific thing is worth. I've spent more days fixing this or that functionality over the span of my life since the early nineties than I care to admit.
As for sharing specific files with specific people or the entire network, as I said, following the article of suggested actions on their website did not work for me. I'm probably not doing something correctly, but anyway, that's beside the point. The point is that I wish I had another solution that worked as well as the apparently obvious move to Win 10 will be. But I'm definitely interested in setting up a file server in the manner a couple of you described. Thank you for that.
Maybe I'll take the content I have, cut the cord to Studio, and focus on Octane or one of the other solutions mentioned, something that will allow me to work without the constant monitoring and interaction required. As I get older, I find I'm interested in online anything less and less.
@jimdoria_834291a734 - Your server solution is intriguing given my use case scenario. Mind if I PM you here to ask more details?
@Wanderer "As I get older, I find I'm interested in online anything less and less"
?? Studio does not require you to be online.
Setting up a file server is a very easy build or conversion. Take or buy an older PC with a MoBo with a reasonable number of Sata connections. You don't need a fast or high core CPU, if you use an Intel one, and you should, you don't even need a GPU. Get enough HDD's to cover all your storage needs for a while. Install FreeNAS, based on BSD (a kind of Unix related to Linux) it is easy to install and setup. If you want it to work as a DVR or media streamer that takes a little more setup but there are lots of guides around.
Fortunatelly, the two button thing was solved close to 20 years ago!
Sort of solved. Yes, Mac's have right click. No, it isn't used nearly as widely for the sorts of things its used for on Windows. Plus for some reason Apple has loaded up context menu's with stuff that most users will never need, one of the default options, last time I used Mac at least, was "convert text to simplified chinese."
Thanks, again, @kenshaw011267, I will definitely explore that option. Yep, @nemesis10, thanks, but @rsharp schooled me already. I tried Mac in college, couldn't wrap my head around the differences between it and PCs with which I was already pretty familiar, and never looked back. Now, with the Nvidia thing, I see no reason to change that.
Mmm... @fastbike1, You're right--nothing really requires me to be online these days, but if I want to keep using my platinum membership, expanding my library, and updating my studio version, I will need to return sooner or later. And for that I need a secure OS, which means updates, and well, there you go, back at square one. But that was only a side note. I'm still wishing for an alternative to Win 10 that will do the things I need with Nvidia at full potential. Guess it's just wishful thinking after all.
@kenshaw011267, looking at some guides on using FreeNAS to set up file server. It doesn't seem as hard as diving into Unix/Linux totally. I really appreciate you pointing me this way.
De nada. If you have any questions about it feel free to ask. You can also search around on YouTube for videos by ServeTheHome and Level1 Techs who have both set up and discussed NAS's several times.
Be my guest! Happy to discuss the details with you.
All of those things... "services" are customizable; it is pretty hard to figure out what most usres need other than the standard focus groups who pick things like "convert text to simplified chinese." i.e convert to the most common language in the world.
Just to update the kind folks who gave me some advice--and anyone else curious about what they'll do before MS cuts Win 7 loose in January (unless you're one of those business people who intend to pay for continued support, per machine, per tier, no thanks), I went ahead and downloaded the Win 10 upgrade tool and installed over Win 7 Ultimate. A lot to learn, but hopefully they won't wreck me with updates while I'm doing so. So far all is well, and all my desktop icons, taskbar links, and so on are still where I expect them to be. Not happy about the obvious things, but I guess I can live with them for now.
On the positive side, even though the free upgrade offer expired, and the reserved upgrade I made way back then just in case also expired, MS is being lenient and it took my Win 7 key and upgraded me to Win 10 Pro. The word is they are accepting Win 7 and 8 keys for everyone interested in taking the plunge. No addtional purchase necessary. I didn't even need to call support or do any of that stuff to get them to take the key. It was handled completely automatically--registered while upgrading. When I build the new system next week, I'll most likely dig out another Windows 7 key I'm holding onto and feed it that on install for whatever version of 10 that gets me. I expect there'll be some surprises when I attempt to use some of my older software, but oh well.
Thanks again everyone. (Will be working on a server to handle network storage as my next project after this one is finished, thanks to a few commentors.)
I've never heard of any software that works in Win7 that doesn't in Win10. There could be one but it would have to be pretty obscure.
Okay, just to update, and share my frustration in order to support and clarify earlier comments--I spent the better part of last night trying to share a printer with my network. Four computers using updated versions of Windows 10. All with advanced sharing options on. All on private network. Two machines with just-updated versions of Win 10 are actually visible to the other computers as PC's, which shouldn't happen apparently since that functionality was stripped. The other two PC's appear as media servers on the network, but not to every other machine equally. Shared folders appear on other PC's hit or miss--meaning some see them, but others don't. After pulling my hair out for hours, 3 computers out of 4, at any given time, may use the printer. Following the wisdom of Microsoft articles, and even other sources would not allow me just to do what prior functionality did--which is let everyone at once see the dang thing. By process of elimination, the only consistent issue that might account for the way the various computers can or cannot use the printer at the same time is the manner/time that Windows 10 arrived in the home on the machine in question:
1. Upgraded to Win10 immediately upon release.
2. Purchased with Win10 pre-installed about two years after release.
3. Upgraded to Win10 from Win 7 Ultimate at beginning of this month.
4. Clean install of Win10 upon completion of build within past week.
Granted, the printer is quite old now, but it worked just fine with the network solution previously used. Windows 7 had no problems sharing it with the other PC's, even those running 10, even after the old networking stuff was deprecated by MS. Now? Can't get 4 PC's running updated versions of Win 10 to see it simultaneously. Each time I try a different method of connecting to the printer from a PC that cannot see it, the process causes one of the others to no longer see it. The real problem appears to be primarily with my two older computers that were upgraded to Win10 from Win7, although it isn't only with them as my newly built system and the one with Win10 preinstalled at point of purchase each have their quirks as well. Oddly enough, most of my PCs can see the Chromecast just fine, most of the time. Editing the power management options seems to have eliminated random drop-offs of the printer when USB was powered down due to inactivity. I really feel for businesses that have an odd assembly of systems when they go through this. I now understand why some might be willing to pay for extended Windows 7 support after January.
Some may think that an old man is foolish for not wishing to endure this nonsense, but their experience is not my experience. Since this is not primarily Daz related anymore, I'm going to drop it, but just know that not everything simply works as it should, even after meticulously following directions and suggestions over and over. The straw that broke the camels back--changing the idiotically random computer name, as well as the printer name, to something short without symbols or spaces, which allowed me to ensure that a PC that needed the name entered directly in the format \\computer\printer could see it, then meant that another on the network no longer could--consistently giving an error about the network name being no longer valid, on that PC alone. Granted, I'm sure if everything I use was purchased in a relatively short (2-3 year), recent period, and all came with Win10 Pre-inst, everything would be lovely. But it isn't. End of rant.
Many issues could be the cause of this. Does the computer the printer is physically attached to have the latest driver for the printer? Is that driver meant for Win10? The printer manufacturer may have ended support for it before Win 10 came out or you may just need the latest driver. Also if that computer has the newest version of Win 10 that could cause issues with older versions on other machines. When MS pushes out a new version or anything I deploy it to every computer at once. That keeps them all identical which reduces the headaches caused by issues of patched systems not interacting correctly with unpatched ones.
Also are all these Win 10 installations pro? The home version of Win10 has some issues with networking. It doesn't support Domains, the new name of workgroups, for instance.
I don't really believe that support for domains, which was always limited to the Pro versions of Windows, should be the issue. If Microsoft actually has renamed workgroups as "domains", they should have their hands slapped (at least). A domain, which is a very specific technical term that Microsoft is well aware of, is a special type of network that is very unlikely to be found on a home network. Home networks are invariably peer-to-peer networks, not domains. So unless a user has a home network that actually includes a domain controller, Windows Pro should not be required. What may be missing from non-pro machines is the ability to set individual file and folder permissions, but from what the OP has said, it seems that the shares are not using such specifics, but are being shared "publicly" (i.e. shared with "everyone") with all connected machines?
I'm only guessing here, but I'm inclined to think that network discovery may be part of the issue, given the on-again, off-again nature of the problem. I'm not sure whether this was mentioned earlier or not, but is this network cable (ethernet) or WiFi, or mixed?