Linux Rumours - Longer lasting Hardware

[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? = /