Homemade, cheap, plasma CNC

tommylight wrote:

Mint does not have 19.4 !
And i agree with RodW, QtPlasmaC is very slugish on 4GB of ram to the point jogging is useless for precise positioning of the torch, but with 8GB on the same PC it works like a charm.
All of that is understandable as i use Mint with Mate DE that is heavy on resources by itself, adding to that all the Qt cr@p just makes it worse.
Still it looks very nice and is a joy to use and has a ton of features that will put big boys to shame.
Personally i would have stuck with Axis and do a modern layout, but not sure how much trouble would that be. Axis works on a Pentium 3 or 2 or 1 although never tried on a 1!
BTW, i did try to change colors on QtPlasmaC, ended up somewhere between terrible and disgusting, so i reverted back to yelow, just LED's are blue.

As far as I can discern, the only thing that Mint has is a taskbar that makes windows users feel "safe" .

In all honestly, I run MX Linux on 4Gb of ram, be it VM or Cutting hardware. It's snappy, and I do a TON of rapid button clicks when testing stuff, and it all responds instantly. This tells me that it's a OS problem and not a QtVCP or QtPlasmaC or ... problem.

It begs the question: If one has to add 4Gb of ram to make the OS usable, hunt down tons of dependencies, and a bunch of other stuff to make it work, how is it "better"?

When I had Mint, I only went there because the WiFi worked much better in my garage, it didn't cut out all of the time like with Buster. Perhaps I had the wrong driver, idk. Anyways, since going to MX Linux, I still have no problems with my WiFi. As I recall I think Rod has a pretty old WiFi adapter, so it may be worth the $12 investment to get a new WiFi USB dongle (I am happy to link you to the one I have if you'd like) vs dumping in more ram to make an OS usable. Just my $0.02.

I do encourage you to give the tires another kick when I get the user guide created.


Lastly, I agree, the editor seems to be getting worse, I had to manually copy and paste tommy's text to quote it. It only brought in the first sentence the first time.

Oh, one more lastly, when editing things with lots of quotes, code, etc. I found that it puts all of the [/] at the end, while their [] stay put, abandoned . I just copy paste them to the right place one by one until it's correct. It's a real PITA, but that's what I've been doing.

The 19.3 and 19.4 I am referring to are MX-Linux.

As I have said before I run my table with 2Gb RAM with no problems at all. I do keyboard, GUI button and wireless USB jogging without issue. 

rodw wrote:

You are wrong about my wifi. My wifi adapter is built in to an industrial PC with two external antennas. 
Its a significant improvement receptionwise on the previous Wifi dongle that worked flawlessly on mint 17.3 for about 5 years. At least it can be used without massive latency like the builtin causes on my Brix J1900.

My apologies, I couldn't remember what the issue was. I've heard others complain about the brix one as well.

Which leads me to the question. If the kernel is the same for all distros, how can it matter which one you use? The OS is the kernel, not the distro.

From the sounds of it, if you dump a bunch of RAM in the machine, it doesn't.

... having a similar GUi is a massive advantage and here Debian fails miserably even before I complain about its crappy driver support.

I said it tongue-in-cheek, but that was exactly my point, Mint has a similar GUI to Windows, and I think that's a big reason why people choose it. That said, I have my MX Linux set up so it also has a similar feel to windows, which wasn't too difficult

I guess I must be lucky, 2Gb works for me plus my 4Gb Brix has no wifi issues nor does its wifi cause latency problems. 
I don't think I ever had driver issues with Debian either but I always used their non-free images.

I had Wheezy on this one, it's an old gb-bxceh-3205