On a side note, and not wanting to criticize the people that spend their time working on something like this, that UI is the main reason why I still use Windows and macOS. Light grey on a white background, dark grey on a that blue background, a black AMD logo on a dark grey background, the padding around the text inside boxes...
I feel bad saying this when it's a free tool, but it's a shame that open source projects struggle so much with UI stuff.
MacOS and specially Windows has their fair share of great and useful software with questionable UI/UX, this is far from a problem affecting only Linux.
Take a look at modern KDE and specially GNOME software, they are pretty well made regarding UI/UX best practices and GNOME even has a great HIG that they follow strictly on their stuff, you can't even say that regarding Microsoft own software anymore.
> MacOS and specially Windows has their fair share of great and useful software with questionable UI/UX, this is far from a problem affecting only Linux.
In fact, Linux generally offers many more affordances for adjusting the appearance of the UI, especially in comparison to Windows and Mac. If you don't like way your system looks, you can change your UI theme settings, where corresponding options on the proprietary OSes are much more limited.
But most people don't want to have to adjust things, they just want it to be good out of the box.
My friends keep telling me android is better because it offers so much more customization, and I keep telling them I don't want to customize, I just want it to be nice by default, and to me iOS is, so that is a selling point for me.
These options just serve different needs. It's not that one way is right and the other is wrong, it depends on one own's preferences. I'm in the Android and Linux camp in part for the reason your friend says (but there's more), however I believe that everyone should just use what they like best. I would still suggest someone that never used a Linux distro to give it a try, but I don't go further than this.
> But most people don't want to have to adjust things, they just want it to be good out of the box.
That's why software development and distribution are two different concepts in the Linux world. The core software is fully customizable, but people who want preconfigured out-of-the-box experiences can choose a distro that is largely defined by its configuration choices.
The UI is pretty much a copy of CPU-Z's UI. The color scheme comes from the theme and you can use any theme you like, you don't have to use what the author uses.
It looks like CPU-Z (which is fine), it's just not as polished. For example, here you have commas and letters like "y" touching the border of each "box". On CPU-Z there's a padding around the text.
The comment about the colors was based on the screenshots they have on the website, but based on your and other comments here, I can see that it's based on the theme we use use. That's why the AMD logo probably shouldn't be black with a transparent background as then it's hard to see the logo if you're using a dark theme.
Is this a huuuuge deal? Nope. But the programs are just not as polished as they could be.
> It looks like CPU-Z (which is fine), it's just not as polished. For example, here you have commas and letters like "y" touching the border of each "box". On CPU-Z there's a padding around the text.
CPU-Z also does not have padding around the text, it just has a different font, but in the screenshot at techpowerup[0] you can see that, e.g., the "y" in "MBytes" down right is touching (clipped) by the container box and the instruction flags also touch the left side of the box.
It is just that the font in CPU-Z is much smaller than the font used in the screenshots.
Like others said, it depends on your theme. Here is what it looks like on my old thinkpad running gnome 48 with light mode theme: https://i.imgur.com/HLZ120w.png
And it looks like CPU-Z, which I'm fine with. It's just not as polished.
For example, here you have commas and letters like "y" touching the borders of their box. On CPU-Z there's a padding around the text. Black AMD logo with transparent background? That won't work very well with a dark background.
Small things, inconsistencies, etc, are more common (but not exclusive) with open source/linux stuff. That's what I was trying to point out.
> that UI is the main reason why I still use Windows and macOS. Light grey on a white background, dark grey on a that blue background, a black AMD logo on a dark grey background,
If you compare the screenshots on CPU-Z's website and the ones here, I think you can see that while similar, CPU-Z is more "polished". That's the point I was trying to make.
Maybe I am dumb, but why does it have to be a daemon? Why not have the user process fork off the privileged binary to collect data and return the results through stdout?
Forking a process is not free and starting one every hundred of a millisecond* seems very expensive. *I'm do not know which frequency it updates the data but it's usually 1 sec to 0.1 sec.
When I type all that (if I type them correctly, I do a lot of mistakes so I need simple icons to click sometimes), it really doesn't look like CPU-Z in my terminal, I wonder what I'm doing wrong?
Those commands do provide the information. They never claimed it exactly matches the graphical layout.
And I don't think they are even claiming that a graphical presentation of the same info is necessarily wrong or pointless, they are simply saying, that's a lot of c++ for merely wrapping the text in some gui widgets.
It's a fair observation.
I can imagine generating say an html rendition that looks almost the same in a few k of shell. Maybe there's more to it and it wouldn't be so simple, but that is what it looks like.
> Those commands do provide the information. They never claimed it exactly matches the graphical layout.
but that's the thing, the target audience for "CPU-Z for Linux" is not people who want the information (because if you do it's of course trivial to google and find out about /proc/cpuinfo), it's people who want to use a software which is as close as possible to the original CPU-Z (so HTML layout definitely does not cut it either).
> I can imagine generating say an html rendition that looks almost the same in a few k of shell.
considering that the source code assumes that dmidecode won't be present (it embeds it) I doubt you'd reimplement the whole dmidecode in only a few k lines of shell. And that's just a small part of what CPU-X does.
Very nice.
On a side note, and not wanting to criticize the people that spend their time working on something like this, that UI is the main reason why I still use Windows and macOS. Light grey on a white background, dark grey on a that blue background, a black AMD logo on a dark grey background, the padding around the text inside boxes...
I feel bad saying this when it's a free tool, but it's a shame that open source projects struggle so much with UI stuff.
That's just the theme the author is running. If you use a use a standard theme, you'll get a higher contrast text color.
From their wiki: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/04c2219de0884fc8e6bf4d264...
MacOS and specially Windows has their fair share of great and useful software with questionable UI/UX, this is far from a problem affecting only Linux.
Take a look at modern KDE and specially GNOME software, they are pretty well made regarding UI/UX best practices and GNOME even has a great HIG that they follow strictly on their stuff, you can't even say that regarding Microsoft own software anymore.
I just people to do menu bars on desktop again.
Add the Jetbrains search anywhere function if you really just innovate.
No more Hamburger menus.
> MacOS and specially Windows has their fair share of great and useful software with questionable UI/UX, this is far from a problem affecting only Linux.
In fact, Linux generally offers many more affordances for adjusting the appearance of the UI, especially in comparison to Windows and Mac. If you don't like way your system looks, you can change your UI theme settings, where corresponding options on the proprietary OSes are much more limited.
But most people don't want to have to adjust things, they just want it to be good out of the box.
My friends keep telling me android is better because it offers so much more customization, and I keep telling them I don't want to customize, I just want it to be nice by default, and to me iOS is, so that is a selling point for me.
These options just serve different needs. It's not that one way is right and the other is wrong, it depends on one own's preferences. I'm in the Android and Linux camp in part for the reason your friend says (but there's more), however I believe that everyone should just use what they like best. I would still suggest someone that never used a Linux distro to give it a try, but I don't go further than this.
> But most people don't want to have to adjust things, they just want it to be good out of the box.
That's why software development and distribution are two different concepts in the Linux world. The core software is fully customizable, but people who want preconfigured out-of-the-box experiences can choose a distro that is largely defined by its configuration choices.
Gnome is not bad, but GTK has been historically a pain point for development.
Yes, it's not a problem exclusive to Linux or open source, but it's more common on Linux than it is, say, on MacOS.
The UI is pretty much a copy of CPU-Z's UI. The color scheme comes from the theme and you can use any theme you like, you don't have to use what the author uses.
It looks like CPU-Z (which is fine), it's just not as polished. For example, here you have commas and letters like "y" touching the border of each "box". On CPU-Z there's a padding around the text.
The comment about the colors was based on the screenshots they have on the website, but based on your and other comments here, I can see that it's based on the theme we use use. That's why the AMD logo probably shouldn't be black with a transparent background as then it's hard to see the logo if you're using a dark theme.
Is this a huuuuge deal? Nope. But the programs are just not as polished as they could be.
> It looks like CPU-Z (which is fine), it's just not as polished. For example, here you have commas and letters like "y" touching the border of each "box". On CPU-Z there's a padding around the text.
CPU-Z also does not have padding around the text, it just has a different font, but in the screenshot at techpowerup[0] you can see that, e.g., the "y" in "MBytes" down right is touching (clipped) by the container box and the instruction flags also touch the left side of the box.
It is just that the font in CPU-Z is much smaller than the font used in the screenshots.
[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/download/cpu-z/
Like others said, it depends on your theme. Here is what it looks like on my old thinkpad running gnome 48 with light mode theme: https://i.imgur.com/HLZ120w.png
It's actually not bad imo.
The ncurses CLI version looks great.
this is what it looks like for me, https://i.imgur.com/lo2YL57.png
cpu-x tries their best to look like their windows precursor, cpu-z…
And it looks like CPU-Z, which I'm fine with. It's just not as polished.
For example, here you have commas and letters like "y" touching the borders of their box. On CPU-Z there's a padding around the text. Black AMD logo with transparent background? That won't work very well with a dark background.
Small things, inconsistencies, etc, are more common (but not exclusive) with open source/linux stuff. That's what I was trying to point out.
> that UI is the main reason why I still use Windows and macOS. Light grey on a white background, dark grey on a that blue background, a black AMD logo on a dark grey background,
Welcome to Windows.
If you compare the screenshots on CPU-Z's website and the ones here, I think you can see that while similar, CPU-Z is more "polished". That's the point I was trying to make.
The tool hardinfo2 works pretty well for system stats. Somewhat similar to hwinfo64 on windows.
Similar is I-Nex, made with Gambas.
https://github.com/i-nex/I-Nex
https://gambaswiki.org/wiki/app/i-nex
https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html
It would really be nice to not have to require a daemon to make this program useful
Ya. The joy of cpu-z is that its a single small binary.
I wouldn't read too deeply into that. I'm pretty sure cpu-z bundles a driver that is unpacked and installed at runtime (search for 'cpuz sys')
c.f. https://github.com/TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness/CPU-X/wiki...
the daemon separates userspace from root domain, and ensures that the code running with root privileges is very small and easily auditable
Maybe I am dumb, but why does it have to be a daemon? Why not have the user process fork off the privileged binary to collect data and return the results through stdout?
Forking a process is not free and starting one every hundred of a millisecond* seems very expensive. *I'm do not know which frequency it updates the data but it's usually 1 sec to 0.1 sec.
At least in the Flatpak, it can be started by just clicking the "Start daemon" button.
I use it without the daemon. I don't even know what the daemon does.
Nice but does it really have to look like the Windows version? Can’t we imagine and have better things?
But this is one of the better things!
It looks great, but on Linux I got used to cat /proc/cpuinfo
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Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This tool does benchmarks and lists vulkan/opengl capabilities. It's a bit more than a glorified command line frontend.
There are similar commands for those. It is exactly a bit more than a front end.
This is absolutely "Who cares about Dropbox, just use rsync!" level of silly and lazy HN answer :D
When I type all that (if I type them correctly, I do a lot of mistakes so I need simple icons to click sometimes), it really doesn't look like CPU-Z in my terminal, I wonder what I'm doing wrong?
Those commands do provide the information. They never claimed it exactly matches the graphical layout.
And I don't think they are even claiming that a graphical presentation of the same info is necessarily wrong or pointless, they are simply saying, that's a lot of c++ for merely wrapping the text in some gui widgets.
It's a fair observation.
I can imagine generating say an html rendition that looks almost the same in a few k of shell. Maybe there's more to it and it wouldn't be so simple, but that is what it looks like.
> Those commands do provide the information. They never claimed it exactly matches the graphical layout.
but that's the thing, the target audience for "CPU-Z for Linux" is not people who want the information (because if you do it's of course trivial to google and find out about /proc/cpuinfo), it's people who want to use a software which is as close as possible to the original CPU-Z (so HTML layout definitely does not cut it either).
> I can imagine generating say an html rendition that looks almost the same in a few k of shell.
considering that the source code assumes that dmidecode won't be present (it embeds it) I doubt you'd reimplement the whole dmidecode in only a few k lines of shell. And that's just a small part of what CPU-X does.
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