Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephkern | Hacker News Reader

Linux is not bad for your hardware, misconfiguration is bad for your hardware.

Annecdotally, heavy graphic card use on any laptop (yes even running windows) will cause a heat death in a shorter ammuont of time than normally expected.

View on HN

No, in this case, Linux really is bad for your hardware. Reading gp's wiki link, it would seem the feature to clock down the GPU is disabled by default because it's still a work in progress. That would mean that although it works in a lot of cases, it's not yet truly dependable. And if it's not yet truly dependable, then it's not able to dependably care for the hardware in the best way possible. And as such, Linux can be bad for your hardware, though it isn't always.

Any rebuttal you might throw at this reality would make me to look at you more and more like this. :)

http://xkcd.com/644/

Per your claim, some driver for some piece of hardware has a disabled feature which you can use to mess up your hardware.

So why don't you just freaking avoid enabling that feature?

Is it Linux's responsibility to absolutely prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot after taking very special effort to research the best way to blow it off?

Question: does OS X fully support every possible bit of hardware which you can technically make to run with it, with every feature you want? Is it absolutely impossible to shoot yourself in the foot with OS X?

You misunderstood. The lack of the feature (of clocking down the GPU when it's not used) caused his issue. He did not enable it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com