People don't tell you XP is old because of performance reasons. It's a security nightmare.

I'm well aware of the hardlinking that Microsoft does. I've also done some actual analysis measuring the real disk usage of WinSxS by using tools that count the hardlink references. On my Windows 7 installation that had a 16GB WinSxS folder, 14GB of that was unique to WinSxS with no other hardlinks. It isn't as efficient as Microsoft claims it to be.

I did a clean install of 8 and 8.1 in VMs to compare disk usage. 8.1 used slightly more.

I know that feeling all too well...

Perhaps you missed the word "often".

They're trying to leverage the Android market to make Chrome OS more appealing. They don't want this hack running on 3rd party operating systems.

I used Vista, and as long as you had at least SP1, it wasn't bad. However, I find the new taskbar in Windows 7 is enough to make me never want to go back to Vista.

Installation is not the problem. It's mostly driver and software compatibility that holds it back.

That is true, but the post I was replying to claimed that games don't get added to libraries automatically. I was simply giving my counter-anecdote.

I've had Steam put promotional stuff in my library automatically on a couple of occasions.

It definitely makes a difference when I tested software RAID at home, but I doubt "real" servers bother with the Windows storage software stack. It also used a bit more RAM under load, but not enough to be a dealbreaker.

Unnecessary hyperbole.

I never said that HDDs never give warnings. I claimed that HDDs can fail without warning. I've had a few die with controller failures. It's not always a mechanical failure. I've also seen mechanical failures where the SMART information didn't contain any errors. For example, sometimes a head can just crash (rare, but can still happen even on stationary drives). You're making some dangerous assumptions on the types of ways that HDDs can fail, which if you really had dealt with more failed drives than I've had hot meals, you'd know that they aren't always predictable.

I hope you give that same advice to HDD customers. And why are you suggesting that backing up from a drive showing signs of failure is desirable? If I see signs of failure, I don't trust the data coming off it. I junk it, either rebuilding the array or recovering from backup.

I never understood why I've never seen the head assemblies acting independently on any drive - it would drastically improve throughput. Doesn't necessarily need to be striped, being able to service multiple platters simultaneously would help with queued IO.

You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.

That part, systemd is good at. I have no objections to systemd advantages as an init system. The large complexity of doing more than it should encompasses the non-init-system parts of systemd. For example, last I heard they just added DNS caching. Into the init system. Since when does the init system need to handle DNS caching? I'd also argue (controversially) that journald is outside the scope of an init system. It has some compelling arguments for its existence, but surely it should be a separate project rather than an integral part of systemd. I'm sure there are other parts of systemd that I would object to being part of the init system, but systemd adds new features so quickly that I miss most of the feature announcements.