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by unixhero 3617 days ago
Why not run Linux on the metal?
1 comments

Because the power management never quite works as it should
Neither does Windows' power management come close to the hours/work you can squeeze out of OS X on a Mac.
Windows power management is no where near as good as OSX, but that's always going to be an issue with horizontally integrated systems. However Windows PM is light years ahead of Linux.
In large part because the Linux devs have to keep patching around Windows-isms (useless ACPI tables for example), and outright bugs that the OEMs paper over with their drivers for Windows.

Frankly PC hardware is going through a drawn out second system period. First there was ACPI replacing APM, and now we have UEFI replacing the BIOS. In both case we have simple and straight forward systems that can hardly be implemented wrong being replaced with complex and convoluted systems where each implementation have its own quirks and gotchas.

On top of this we have the issue of most OEMs barely testing for Windows, and Microsoft is anything but good at getting their implementations right (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish anyone?).

So Linux PM sucks because OEMs implemented unnecessary and inferior replacements for perfectly functional standards because Microsoft?

Your argument ignores a number of truths.

Much of the original BIOS was being replaced with proprietary extensions by vendors to overcome it's limitations and it was in dire need a replacement. At one point Western Digital was shipping what was basically a boot sector virus to overcome the Hard Drive size limitations imposed by the BIOS.

ACPI doesn't just replace APM, but also PnP and MPS. None of which support newer buses or interfaces and would have to be patched or extended to do so.

Microsoft has no love for ACPI and even went so far as to disable ACPI by default and only enable it for a small whitelist of machines with earlier OSes. Vista was the first OS from Microsoft to actually require ACPI, that means it took them over a decade to come to terms with it.

UEFI was meant to replace both ACPI and the BIOS but hasn't replaced either. Unfortunately vendors have been using UEFI to just load BIOS and ACPI implementations. This isn't at all how it was intended.

You can't blame Microsoft for these standards because PnP and APM are the only ones they had a hand in implementing. It also sounds like they're the ones you actually prefer which is funny. If there's anyone you should be blaming then it's Intel because they championed all of them.

The whole setup is a house of cards and no one seems to like it. Why you choose to blame Microsoft for it is beyond me.

> Windows PM is light years ahead of Linux.

I get the feeling you're speaking from your own experience. In the same vein: my experience has been the opposite. But then again, I'm speaking from experience on a ThinkPad X250 with Arch Linux and tlp vs. ThinkPad X250 with Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7).

If my experience had been with poorer hardware that don't stick to standards, I'd probably have a similar (though far less extreme) view as yours.

Fair point. I'd accept the trade-off if it meant I could use quote-unquote Linux instead of macOS.
Yeah but the Macs either come with gimped AMD GPUs or integrated GPUs.