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What's the difference between idle Linux and idle Windows?
I tend to leave my pc alone for hours at the time, I recently installed Linux Mint as my first distro. Noticed a weird clicking sound from my HDD, apparently, Western Digital Greens have some sort of intelligent parking, which malfunctions in Linux, so it tries to park the heads every 8 sec, causing them to catastrophically fail after a while.
That said I've found a workaround, but it still made me wonder: What happens if I leave my PC idling on Linux? Does it use less resources than Windows? What sorts of background programs run? Is there any worth disabling?
Also I read something about Linux writing on the HDD multiple times a minute - logging or something, is this really necessary? This seems very HDD unfriendly to me. Wouldn't this decrease hard drive lifespan over time?
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>>56029607
It's an interesting question. Linux is known to run hotter/use more battery by default. However, a lot of work has been done to provide tools and settings that are more laptop friendly. Look into powertop, and also google for laptop setup recommendations. cron/syslog is one possible cause for the disks spinning up at regular intervals.
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>>56029607
What's the one in the uppermost left with the moon and star?
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>>56030857
It's Mandriva worst Linux distro ever made
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>>56030702
I actually use desktop, but I was wondering on the hows and whats of how Linux actually works and whether its any better than Windows in this respect
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>>56030857
Allahu Islamubuntu
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>>56031370
Fair enough, but most of the interest in optimizing resource utilization in linux is for laptops. It doesn't mean you can't use it on a desktop to some benefit.
A well used Windows or Linux system is going to build up cruft that uses resources even when idle. My feeling is that you shouldn't really worry about it--except for getting your HDD to stop spinning down.
I personally just leave my desktop on and don't sweat the small stuff.
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>>56030702
>Linux is known to run hotter/use more battery by default.
I've had the opposite experience with Mint 17.3 cinnamon
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>>56031815
OP here, I'm using 17.3 with KDE, because I liked that you can customize a lot there. So far I'm highly pleased with it.
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