Linux Rumours - Longer lasting Hardware

[nankura]

Hey guy's

Apologies if this is in the wrong section, wasnt sure were to post it xD

I've been using linux a phew year's now, ive done arch, ive joined a phew communitys, done debian/ubuntu, and to be honest the most consistant rumour ive heard towards linux is "Linux makes your hardware last longer". Now, im very curious how true or false this really is vs any other operating system.

i understand linux uses less resources. but there are common hardware failures

like hard disks are still the most common devices to die without much explanation why

So im curious, has this rumour ever been explored, proven, or disproved

[coldcritter64]

...So im curious, has this rumour ever been explored, proven, or disproved

Probably has a few times :lol:

[deadflowr]

Try this, find the oldest hardware you can,

and try and put a new version of a linux system on it.

Then try it with a new Windows system.

See which one might actually run on it.

[sudodus]

I think there are two different meanings of 'Longer lasting Hardware'

1. The hardware can work longer before breaking (a statistical average, mean time between failure), technical life-time.

2. The hardware can be used longer before getting obsolete (inefficient, difficult or impossible to use because of new software or tasks), economic life-time

I think that people are thinking about the second alternative, that linux can keep aging hardware efficient, and make it last longer that way. But there is a limit also when using linux. See this link http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2130640

[Hylas de Niall]

Probably has a few times :lol:

Where's the 'like' button? LOL!

[HermanAB]

Consumer hardware seldom lasts longer than about 5 years - even if you don't use it at all, the capacitors still deteriorates.

[leclerc65]

I have friends that own BSOD PCs, even with freshly installed XP. They are all reincarnated as Lubuntu machines.

[mastablasta]

funny that... my wife got an old mashcine with 256MB ram (can be maxed 384MB) at and 1,2Ghz as a gift. windows xp came preloaded :-O needles to say windowsXP needs at least 1GB ram to run reasonably. anyway we struggled with the mashcine for quite some time. it took 10 minutes to boot, it was then crashing or just rebooting by itself. i decided to try ubutnu 10.04 on it. it ran well at first but then started to become slow. so Chrunchbang replaced it. and so far it runs like a charm. boots in abotu 30-45 seconds. can watch you tube videos (amybe full screen they get a bit jerky but meh...). it is also interesting to notice that not a single crash happened since i've installed linux to it. strange.

[3Miro]

Windows 7 was the first windows released that didn't require fairly high end machine to just run the OS. If you are using Windows, you have to upgrade your hardware just to keep up with the demands of the OS. Linux on the other hand runs on older hardware and hence upgrades are not needed nearly as often.

In addition, Linux has very good HDD caching policies and doesn't require defragging, which reduces the stress on mechanical hard drives. Also, older versions of Windows on older hardware required quite a bit of swap usage.

The statement about old hardware was somewhat true in the past, it may no longer be true in the future.

[sudodus]

Windows 7 was the first windows released that didn't require fairly high end machine to just run the OS. If you are using Windows, you have to upgrade your hardware just to keep up with the demands of the OS. Linux on the other hand runs on older hardware and hence upgrades are not needed nearly as often.

In addition, Linux has very good HDD caching policies and doesn't require defragging, which reduces the stress on mechanical hard drives. Also, older versions of Windows on older hardware required quite a bit of swap usage.

The statement about old hardware was somewhat true in the past, it may no longer be true in the future.

I agree with most of this :-) But what statement about old hardware are you referring to?

[Copper Bezel]

I think he's saying that if Windows 7 and 8 are precedents, the base requirements for Windows might actually not be on an asymptotic march toward infinity, and Windows might be just as friendly to today's hardware in five years as Linux is.

[rrich1974]

In addition, Linux has very good HDD caching policies and doesn't require defragging, which reduces the stress on mechanical hard drives..

that is a very true statement, i can see this myself that in windows 7, there are times when HDD just works like hell.....i don't know what is doing.

[VanillaMozilla]

Consumer hardware seldom lasts longer than about 5 years - even if you don't use it at all, the capacitors still deteriorates.
Huh?

My first PC, a 12-MHz 286, is still in service doing an important task. My second PC, a 386SX, is out of service because it's not needed, but it was recently fired up for the purpose of reading some 5 1/4" floppies. My third PC, a 486, still runs, I think, but it needs a diskette drive. My fourth PC, the earliest and slowest Pentium ever made (originally Windows 3), is still in use, performing a critical control function.

My fifth PC, a 665-MHz Pentium, was originally running NT (now XP), and is my main PC at one location. It gets several hours of service daily. It's trouble-free, and I happen to be typing on it at the moment. It has a newer hard drive, but the original is still installed.

There are also a couple of discarded 900-MHz Pentiums I put back into regular service, and a Core Duo about 5 years old, which is used several hours daily. There were others too, all still working, I think.

How is all this possible? Repairs. Here's the sum total: two hard drives, replaced for impending problems; two CD drives and two floppy drives replaced; one floppy drive cleaned with canned air; and two dead monitors replaced. And that's all.

Of those I mentioned, three can run Ubuntu and three can run Windows XP. To be brutally honest, XP has been trouble-free, has lasted longer than any Ubuntu, and runs faster. I'm not buying any untestable rumors.

[VanillaMozilla]

One other thing. The best of these has 1 GB of memory. Why would anyone need more? The next best has 500 MB. Granted, 500 is a bit small for the newer, bloated Linux systems, ;) and certainly too small for Windows 7 and 8.

I do video editing on Ubuntu with 1 GB, and never run short. It's a quaint notion, probably fostered by hardware salesmen and Windows, that the solution to all computer problems is to add memory. I know it's possible to use up multiple gigabytes, but I have no idea how to do that in ordinary use. Possibly some people are misreading the output of the 'free' command.

[3Miro]

I agree with most of this :-) But what statement about old hardware are you referring to?

Technology is moving away from mechanical HDD and to the SSD and SSD drives are less affected by fragmentation issues. The SSD technology may equalize Linux and Windows on the life expectancy of storage disks.

[tomdkat]

I do video editing on Ubuntu with 1 GB, and never run short. It's a quaint notion, probably fostered by hardware salesmen and Windows, that the solution to all computer problems is to add memory. I know it's possible to use up multiple gigabytes, but I have no idea how to do that in ordinary use. Possibly some people are misreading the output of the 'free' command.Here is the output of "free" on my system:



tom@deathstar:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2437108 2297476 139632 0 44284 345184
-/+ buffers/cache: 1908008 529100
Swap: 4192960 85360 4107600
tom@deathstar:~$
On a daily basis, I run the following applications:

Mozilla Thunderbird
Google Chrome (with 5 tabs open, including one for streaming with Pandora)
Pidgin
rdesktop connection to Windows XP system in a terminal window
DropBox client


On occasion I might watch a video on my hard drive, open additional browsers, edit a document in LibreOffice, or edit a web page in BlueFish (HTML editor). The above "free" output was generated with the above running applications running only, with the exception being I have a 6th tab open to this forum. :)

I'm currently running Ubuntu 13.04 (64-bit) on an ancient eMachines T6414 system, with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor running at 2GHz and with 2.5GB of RAM. I've gradually upgraded to 2.5GB over the years. The system came with 512MB of RAM.

Peace...

[rrich1974]

still, there are some problems with the temperature, i am talking about my hardware and 12.04 vs windows seven enterprise.
when i watch some flash player based video podcasts, on W 7even a have 45 vs 60 (flash 11.2), 63 (pepper flash 11.7 chrome).
that is a real issue, :( due to the fact that a lot of internet multimedia content is based on flash player.

[3Miro]

still, there are some problems with the temperature, i am talking about my hardware and 12.04 vs windows seven enterprise.
when i watch some flash player based video podcasts, on W 7even a have 45 vs 60 (flash 11.2), 63 (pepper flash 11.7 chrome).
that is a real issue, :( due to the fact that a lot of internet multimedia content is based on flash player.

Flash sucks on any OS and double so on Linux. The player uses way too much CPU resources, it will hog one core of your CPU regardless of how fast or slow your processor may be.

Try using HTML5 or in the past the media player could play YouTube videos without the need of a browser.

[VanillaMozilla]

Here is the output of "free" on my system:
I believe you. I'm not familiar with all of those particular apps, but still I just don't know why they are taking so much memory. Perhaps it's the 64 bits, which does require more. But my experience is that Linux apps are very sensible and economical about memory use. Perhaps they are programmed to use a large fraction of available memory, no matter how much or how little is available.

In any case, for people who don't adhere to the "must have more" philosophy of memory, I suspect you could run those quite satisfactorily with far less. At least that's my experience. I'm always puzzled by these large memory requirements. It just doesn't reflect my experience--and I sometimes run lots of big apps too.

If you have a computer without a lot of memory, my suggestion is to just try it. You may be pleasantly surprised. And as for the subject of this thread -- longer-lasting hardware -- it's dubious.

[Copper Bezel]

I'm doing something wrong. This is a fresh boot:

djmcbratney@Rei-Rei:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3932484 1189384 2743100 0 64508 555332
-/+ buffers/cache: 569544 3362940
Swap: 4077564 0 4077564
The Dropbox client, my Tomboy notes indicator, Chrome's background service, and Glippy start at login, along with Touchégg and other little things. I'm running 13.04 with Unity. Is that bad? = /

[CharlesA]

I'm doing something wrong. This is a fresh boot:

djmcbratney@Rei-Rei:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3932484 1189384 2743100 0 64508 555332
-/+ buffers/cache: 569544 3362940
Swap: 4077564 0 4077564
The Dropbox client, my Tomboy notes indicator, Chrome's background service, and Glippy start at login, along with Touchégg and other little things. I'm running 13.04 with Unity. Is that bad? = /

What's bad about it? It looks like you are only using 550MB of memory.


root@Thor:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 16281948 16188408 93540 0 7584 15205212
-/+ buffers/cache: 975612 15306336
Swap: 19779576 0 19779576


I'm using more than that and I'm not running a GUI.

Isn't memory meant to be used?

[Copper Bezel]

Oh, I see. I was, um, misreading the output of free, as presaged. So the -/+ buffers/cache: line is the "real" memory usage, not the Mem: line? That's much more consistent with what I'm seeing in System Monitor. = ) But now I'm realizing that I don't really understand how memory works, because I really don't understand what the first line signifies.

[Cheesemill]

This should explain it to you...

http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

[Copper Bezel]

Sweet. I'd read the LINFO page on free, but it only led me to further confusion. Thanks. = )

[kurt18947]

I find HTOP - found in the repositories - useful for determine resource usage. It's not a GUI app so doesn't require much in the way of resources for itself yet is more informative than top IMO.

[CharlesA]

Oh, I see. I was, um, misreading the output of free, as presaged. So the -/+ buffers/cache: line is the "real" memory usage, not the Mem: line? That's much more consistent with what I'm seeing in System Monitor. = ) But now I'm realizing that I don't really understand how memory works, because I really don't understand what the first line signifies.

I usually stick to free -m so it is easier to read. :)


I find HTOP - found in the repositories - useful for determine resource usage. It's not a GUI app so doesn't require much in the way of resources for itself yet is more informative than top IMO.

+1. As much as I like top, htop is more colourful. ;)