10 Reasons Why Not to Install Linux

I'm a lurker, of sorts. I tend to stick around mailing lists (where drama is less frequent), but I also like to read what users are thinking about a particular subject. I think most people call that news.

Anyway, I'll introduce myself. My real name is Matt, I go by the pseudonym Sofisticated. If you need a reason why I think I have a say, well, I've done work with FreeBSD for some projects with some companies that, unless you want to be my next employer, I can't really say too much about. (:

I think I remember Tuxchick from Linuxtoday. You're Carla, aren't you? Even if you aren't, I remember seeing your stories around here for years. Anyways, it makes me sad to see someone who I held in relatively high esteem go and call someone a "savage". I don't think I could call somebody else a "savage" unless, well, they were Stalin, maybe even Genghis Khan. Well, if I compared him to Genghis Khan, I'd also call him a player... I mean...

I digress.

Both you, Tuxchick, and lcafiero I've seen nice to fewt. I have no affiliation with fewt, though I do subscribe to him on Google+, but I also subscribe to a lot of other developers.

Maybe I just have a bit of a different attitude toward companies like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, and maybe that's an inclination for some of the attitudes presented here. I know fewt is more sympathetic towards Microsoft for certain things, such as power management. I've also seen him commend the developments of Mono, which has a lot to do with Microsoft too. Well, I'm a FreeBSD guy, which I say hypocritically as I type this on a netbook running Lubuntu, and I guess I just don't see anything wrong with that. I'm not going to go into what Windows is good for, even though we all know that Linux doesn't touch FreeBSD on the server (/humor).

I'm just sad to see people write him off so quickly. I would really like to see something like Jupiter in desktop FreeBSD systems. I'm using it right now on this netbook, and I do see a difference. Now, I'm not defending fewt and saying you're all wrong for throwing him away so quickly (which you kinda are), I'm just saying that fewt does have a point. He's really good at what he does, in this case power, and he's just having trouble defending his position in front of users.

As a developer myself, I never come in contact with other users, because most users are not able to see something from your perspective. The main difference between a site like this and, say, a mailing list is that on a mailing list, I'm backed up by several other developers vouching for my position, such as lack of time or inabilities with in a domain. On a board like this, you're likely surrounded by a bunch of users who think they know better just because they haven't met much resistance before. It's easy to gripe at developers and accuse them of not knowing what they're doing, but it's hard to get a user to understand from a developers point of view, especially from what I've seen on boards like this where there is a lot of hesitance towards Microsoft and "the Microsoft way" as opposed to "the Linux way".

Lcafiero was talking about how, as a project leader, fewt should have more maturity and diplomacy. For a business, you're absolutely correct, but diplomacy and maturity are not things you find in the FOSS space for software leads. Stallman is not the nicest person to work around. He's been known to lash out at those who work hard against what he works for, which includes Microsoft and Apple. Pidgin for the longest time had a team that would spit in your face before they would, say start developing for other networks or change their goals. Last I remember this being the case was around 2006 when Sean Egan, who now works for Google, was project lead. I think it had something to do with passwords being stored in plaintext and the team pretty much saying "Do it yourself" with what sounded like a bit of hostility.

Of course, you have opposite ends of the spectrum on that note. You have people like Stallman that are praised, yet he's been known to have bad attitudes for proprietary software and those who make it. But, you also have people like Miguel de Icaza of the Gnome and Mono projects who attracts a lot of hate, but I don't think I've ever met such a highly respectable person in my life. He's very friendly, and even though there are very rabid, disdainful people of his, he keeps himself in good standing.

I could probably name quite a few cases where the project lead is not the nicest person. It's good to know that kindness, dignity, nor respect make a good leader. A good leader gets the job done, and even then, they're not perfect. The only perfect leader I knew was Kim Jung Il, but he's dead (/humor).

Nobody likes reading long posts, so I'll wrap it up here. I like fewt, he's a nice guy, I've talked with him a few times before and I'm a fan of his work. Now, my opinion isn't enough to see him back in, but hey, he's human. He's no more or less human than anybody on this board. Besides that, he's super active in the Linux ecosphere, providing various fixes here and there, providing software that helps patch in the holes where the capabilities exist but the triggers do not, and managing a distribution which I imagine is anything but simple, and if his G+ is any indication, managing big, exciting changes in his own life.

I really do not think that fewt's statement regarding power management being better implemented in Windows than in Linux has anything to do with the deletion of comments or of his account. The language used caused his comments to be deleted due to TOS violations. I would assume that repeated TOS violations would result in an account being deleted.

In terms of the subject...

I have access to one windows laptop, an HP elitebook 2530p. It is provided by my current employer. I do not believe I have enough knowledge to judge windows vs linux implementations of power management.

However I do know that my one windows laptop does not do a good job of managing itself. This could probably be fixed if I had admin rights to the machine and could keep trying solutions until finding one that works.

If I suspend it, everything seems fine, until I open the lid or "un-suspend" it. It always crashes trying to come out of suspend. I have sent it to our help desk and they cannot resolve the issue. I do not have administrative rights so I cannot adjust the settings. If I close the lid while it is on, I know it will crash when I open it up and I will have to reboot. A subset of fellow employees here at work experience the same issues as I do, but not all.

This one failure is certainly not enough to condemn Windows in general as being a failure when compared to Linux in terms of power management. I used to have an IBM thinkpad t42 from a previous employer that was dual boot Windows/Linux. I observed similar battery life under either operating system. I had no problems with suspend or hibernate under either operating system.

I booted from a usb-key into a live version of linux on my current work laptop. Suspend worked fine in bodhi linux 1.2.1 so I do not believe it is a hardware issue.

@tuxchick: Well, point taken. :)

All I'm saying is, judge a man by his work an not by his speech. Now, I'm not trying to change the discussion, but give an example. One that we might more relate to is RMS's disposition towards Torvalds. Outside the exclusively-FOSS realm, Torvalds is a nice guy, the "have a beer" with kind of guy, but around RMS, his attitude is joking, perhaps terse towards the cause.

Just give the guy a break. He's carrying a lot on his shoulders, and some people become very compassionate of their work. When it's your tears in the product, you tend to treat it like it's your child, and defend it as such. I'm just asking to lay off the "he's a mad lunatic" stuff. It keeps the board civil and respectable, as no one has ever won a war through screaming and accusations. I'm sure you wouldn't like someone writing you off as just a fanatic of GNU/Linux, throwing anything out that you might have said that's credible.

Just because somebody's stubborn doesn't make them an idiot. It just makes them stubborn.

At a risk of going completely off topic, here's my thoughts on the subject:

I agree with fewt that Windows has much better power strategies than Linux. That's not to say that Windows machines will stay alive longer than Linux machines. For instance, the netbook I'm on now has a few hours more battery life under Linux than Windows 7. That's a giant leap! What really makes the difference is the overall demand on the system. When you rule out the obvious parts that don't cause high power consumption, such as RAM, you're left with the most probable parts for high consumption, which is most likely the display, processor, and HDD.

OEMs are possibly the best people at figuring out the best methods of power consumption. This is aided by the OS, for instance Microsoft, knowing the best ways at reducing power consumption by modifying the system facilities. But moreover, Windows just has better support for hardware than Linux.

For instance, the largest, if not the problem for the power regression of Linux reported by Phoronix back in June (link at bottom of post), was due to ASPM, or Active-State Power Management. The big reason was that the kernel refused to touch the ASPM registers if the BIOS said it didn't support it. What happened? The BIOS enabled ASPM anyways and said it didn't support it. The kernel only had to assume that ASPM wasn't evident on this system and ignored it. The PCI-E devices never went into low powered mode and the system, coincidentally, used more power, It was actually less of a case of hardware support and more about misconfigured BIOS's, but the same "OEM knows more than the hackers" story nonetheless. This is the sort of issue that wouldn't happen as often if OEMs had more access through a less restricted means to the kernel. (That's the BSD guy in me talking)

Now, let's say these "misconfigurations" didn't exist. Windows has the better power management. It's hard to compete with guys that have nearly every device the product will run on at their disposal, 8-hours per day, overtime on weekends, and a sweet paycheck to incentivize the deal. But, at the end of the day, it's much easier to assume a lower powered system under Linux than under Windows. The answer to why is a complicated one at best, but it's best to put as that, Linux, unlike Microsoft, isn't under the same pressures. It doesn't have to provide a lightning fast search system, nor does it have to keep up with competitors or the constant pressure to improve.

Linux is in a position where it can provide facilities that don't require fancy services or extra processing to present a pretty result. I use Lubuntu, which is basically a Debian-like LXDE system. LXDE doesn't do anything special. It's barely more advanced than the user interface in Windows 98. This could also be extended to any lightweight system. Give me a Haiku netbook with full access to the hardware power management facilities and it will run for longer than Windows 7 (which is what I'm comparing it to, for future reference). I use Chrome, leafpad, old Penguin games, and PCManFM. Do they index? No. Do they do special things that would require any sort of even-slightly-intensive system processing? I don't think so.

Microsoft, on the other hand, works to please their audience. People want flashy things, that do cool tricks, do it well, and for a long time. Give me a system that provides all the facilities of Windows 7 under a Linux box and I can almost assure you that Windows will last longer than the Linux substitute. Neither KDE or GNOME have the money behind it to achieve that, but I do commend their results thus far. Apps like Jupiter help, but aren't a magic bullet. As long as Firefox keeps having memory leaks, lightweight machines will swap, and that will spin the disk. Spinning the disk costs power, and usually lots of it.

To the person who didn't like the extra memory taken up by Mono, taken comfort in that the more Mono apps are running, the less overall memory they'll take per application. Also take comfort in that, if the entire payload stays in RAM, that the power consumption of the load is negligible. You'll probably spend more power in keeping the RAM active over the lifetime of the system then you will by subsequent accesses. RAM is power cheap when compared to the graphics, processor, or storage.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_263...