I agree, and I did mention at the end of my post that I'm not saying we'd see any radical changes in energy consumption. At the end of the day, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation etc use gigawatts more power than any computing activity does currently, and although that could change in the future, I do still think it's an interesting thought to have.
I think the other difficulty would be the requirement of knowing both Linux and Windows through-and-through to ensure the code you're writing is leveraging all the os-specific advantages. But yes, it's definitely an interesting hypothetical.
Yes, I probably should have rephrased that as "are often more efficient" rather than implying that this is always the case. I do think, and I mentioned this somewhere else, though, that it's quite a hard comparison to make. I'd probably make the argument that if the driver itself was the issue, making the driver open-source would likely (and that's a "likely" going off an assumption which I can't back up) be more efficient.
Generally speaking, my point does still apply for fully open-source software which has been developed specifically for Linux. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing much mainstream Linux-bespoke software for a while, at least not until the year of the Linux desktop finally arrives.
I completely agree with what you're saying, though.
You probably could, but reasonably there's not enough data out there to do this.
Still, I'll mention that even with an AMD CPU and GPU, Linux does often lack support or configuration off-the-bat, to massively varying degrees. The well-known example of this is with Nvidia's propriety GPU drivers, which historically have been a massive issue, and will probably continue to be for a while even with Nvidia exposing more of its source code with its GPU drivers.
The kind of support which I'm referring to, though, extends beyond this in many ways. One thing I didn't mention, for example, is software support for linux. Many linux ports fail to leverage the full potential of Linux, either because the developers don't know how to, or because they don't care to. I recently read a dev blog for Factorio relating to this issue. The developer spoke about a very specific optimization which can be applied to Linux when saving games, which, in short, allowed for games to be saved concurrently, improving performance. Using this feature requires programming specifically for linux. While Proton offers incredible gaming support on Linux today, this sort of thing is not something which Proton can magically make work on its own.
The same sort of idea often extends out into other areas of software and hardware. Applications which have been directly ported to Linux without much consideration often fail to implement these sorts of additional features and optimizations.
The issue of hardware is, indeed, slightly different. One key thing which is often overlooked by people when assessing this sort of thing is the optimizations and tweaks applied by the hardware manufacturers and vendors themselves. These tweaks are often highly specific to the hardware they're used for, and usually the vendors will only apply them to work with Windows, or the operating system which the laptop or computer ships with. Going back to the driver issue, the same thing applies. GPU manufacturers will often release high-quality drivers aimed specifically at Windows, offering optimizations which specifically benefit Windows. There's almost zero incentive for these companies to release the same, or on-par drivers for Linux, due to its smaller market share.
What this means, is that a much larger amount of work needs to be done by the Linux community to create or improve drivers for specific hardware. Drivers which will work off-the-bat with Windows will not work at all with Linux, and companies which offer Linux alternatives for their drivers often invest significantly more time on their Windows-counterparts. This is only complicated by the fact that many hardware manufacturers keep their driver source-code highly secretive, so trying to program one or alter an existing one for linux is significantly more difficult.
AMD, as you mentioned, is often much better than alternatives such as Nvidia when it comes to releasing these "secrets" or source code, which makes developing AMD drivers for Linux significantly easier, allowing driver developers to apply many more optimizations than they would otherwise be able to.
In conclusion, then, the only way this can truly be fixed is if these companies choose to support Linux as much as they do Windows, which unfortunately won't truly happen until there's some sort of monetary incentive (ie Linux having a majority market share).
Exactly. Climate change we have the chance to mitigate, and very possibly prevent / reverse. The heat death on the other hand is not only just a theory as to how the universe might end, but also something that would likely be completely out of our control, assuming that humans even survive a fraction of the time until then. Most likely, there'll be something else that kills us first.
Surprised I've not seen more people mention this. Will of the wisps music was bomb too. Gareth Coker is an incredible composer.
Am using it without root on my phone at the moment. Perhaps it's a bug with the patcher
I thought wine was open source, or am I misunderstanding you ?.
"Diamond-hard boners for Denuvo". Beautiful statement. Sums up pretty much every Triple A studio out there at the moment.
Ahh, that's cool, and you get a lovely coastal view, too! I've not really played much survival, and that looks like it must have taken a really long time to build!
Thanks a lot :)
If you still have the save, I'd love to see some photos of your treehouse, maybe even post them here at some point!
I think that's the big thing. The vast majority of computer users need little more than a bit of word processing, YouTube, maybe some online banking. Beyond that? Nothing at all.
These tasks require such a ridiculously small amount of computing power when compared to other tasks, such as gaming and video editing, that 90% of the power their computer has is just not needed, and is instead being consumed by Windows.