It’s been a while since I posted and thought I would throw out a post. So as I continue to shoot the stars and enjoy the process of capturing the heavens above, I wanted to see if I could speed up PixInsight which is the application I use to process my hours of capturing the stars. Forty-Five hours since December to be exact, not too bad considering the weather has been on and off here in New Mexico and I have another probably 5 hours of data I have yet to process on multiple objects that I am still capturing. Anyhow the whole thing came down to a post I made on Cloudy Nights showing how to speed up PixInsight
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/756477-lets-speed-up-pixinsight/
What that link shows is how my Apple Mac Mini was a speedy little guy with the edits I made, but if you read on you will see I took the Mac Mini and reloaded it with Ubuntu 20.04.2 and damn near increased PixInsight by almost 50% by changing the operating system. So to me, that means a couple of things
- Either Apple’s operating system is not designed well for hardware (I was using Big Sur)
- Ubuntu’s operating is designed better for hardware
- PixIsnight didn’t do the best job with the OS X release
I would be hard pressed to think PixInsight didn’t do a good job with the application as it runs well on all platforms based on user feedback. My thought is Big Sur which just came out is just not up to par yet with other Apple operating systems and that really pushes me to stay in the Ubuntu camp. It’s not easier to learn Ubuntu over Windows or Apple but the more time I spend in the OS for a daily driver the more I am really enjoying it, and I mean a lot! The last time I ran Linux as a daily driver was back in 2000 when I was using Slackware for everything. Mind you I have still used some form of Linux on and off but mostly for my big rig which is only turned on when I am compiling software.
Now first off don’t you think for a minute that Ubuntu runs perfectly on the Mac Mini. As a matter of fact, it took me multiple times to load Ubuntu onto the Mac Mini as Apple is so focused on not letting users install other operating systems on their computers unless it’s Windows. I have also had some weirdness with the Bluetooth but no worse than what was going on in Big Sur. Anyways, for now, I am going to continue on with Ubuntu as every app I want to use seems to be working even if it means I may need to learn a new way of doing things and I will continue on with my almost 50% increase in speed over OS X when using Pixinsight.