In linux all of those adjustments are accessible by the user, and they can be fine-tuned on a per-system basis using real benchmarks of the actual load. You can have the CPU spend whatever amount of time sleeping you want to, thanks to the fine engineering at the CPU outfits. The efficiency of CPU low-power states is dependent on purchasing hardware that supports the power modes you desire. I personally don't like my CPUs to spin their wheels, so I pay extra for fancy AMD chips that are extra slow. This is the future. You can have the pixels you deserve.

Right. They used to use more expensive parts... back when they were competing with IBM. ;)

It makes sense, he omitted the anecdote and jumped straight ahead to an unsupported assertion.

Personally I prefer the bare assertion, it takes less time to suffer through and laugh down than the anecdote. I don't know how many times somebody has threatened to stab me for insulting their grandpappy when actually no, I just wasn't interested in weighing the anecdote about him.

Software you did learn how to use is easier than software you didn't learn how to use. More at 11.

Yeah, if you run linux the input impedance is too high, so the CPU runs less efficiently. You need real Monster brand OSX to get the full battery life. /s

Did you imagine that the defaults would be different depending on distro, and that if you adjust everything for maximum battery life and have the same software load, that it would be exactly the same? The technology is not substantially different, there is no excuse for a wide battery life gap. But your claimed reason... it is very funny.

So, you're saying that Americans didn't know that calls to Iran would be monitored, and so having those calls monitored without them knowing somehow creates a creaping sheep-state? That is really daft in 100 ways. You can be for or against the surveillance in the story, and either way that idea is equally stupid; Americans always knew that communications that are really in fact to an overseas person, especially a person in Iran, would be monitored. That is not actually even controversial. So even if you're against it, you're against it knowing that it is popular, not a secret.

I'm assuming the Russians drink a lot because they have no power. It is a lot different to be oppressed by forces you can't control than what we do in America, which is to knowingly and intentionally elect politicians that will institute an information/surveillance state. If the Russians didn't want what they have, they'd still have it. If Americans decide we want something different, it will change in just a few years. Whoever is telling you Americans are just sheep really has you by the credulity-bone.

If you let them have access in the case of "dire" need, you'll find lots of dire needs just coincidentally popping up. That would be almost exactly the same as now. I agree with your general premise, if it was possible. I just don't see it being so.

Better would be to have it all locked in that basement, and have all the people allowed in the basement closely watched by other agencies without access, and all their non-basement activities to be published and transparent; and the activities of the watcher-watchers, too.

We have that, it is called an "information sharing system."

Gee, and here I thought it was the department that manages the government lawyers.

So, where do the lawyers get managed in your universe?

Unlike me? Look kid, you can claim your own history and experience, but you have on reason to know anything more than that.

Look at your damn user ID, you're a fresh green sprout not an old-timer. If you aren't smart enough to look at my ID and see I've been here since the 90s, then get off the lawn and don't come back until you're ready to stop lying and claiming to know how long others have been doing this.

Just, assume that sysadmins already know how SysV init works. You don't need to explain it. We know. And you left out all the known problems with it, conveniently.

Users don't use RH because they're forced to; they have lots of choices and they choose redhat.

Other distros are influenced by RH for their own reasons that you can't claim ownership of. You can't claim that they were forced, because they don't claim they were forced; they claim they made the best decision.

The whole "the others are just derivatives" is a pile of entitled horse shit, to put it mildly. The translation is, "gosh, none of the people who dislike the decision understand this stuff well enough to make their own distro." Well, fine, then maybe their complaints are vapid and superfluous and they're not affected by the changes. If they were sysadmins whose lives were affected, they could actually put some effort where their words are and create a new distro.

You kids these days don't realize, in the 90s we already had dozens of different distros, and a zillion people who could make a new one if they felt like it. You have to take ownership of your own decisions. Can't make anything yourself? Fine, but why would you be choosing how the things are made? Want to be part of the choice? Learn how to make something.

I'll give you a hint, making a distro is entry-level stuff. You don't need any real skills or talents. All you have to do is install a few thousand upstream packages by hand on a from-scratch system, record what you did, choose how you want to make that repeatable, and package it up. A pre-teen nerd could do this in one school holiday. An internet whiner who plays computer games but doesn't know how their computer works, not so much.

By "poison the well," you mean what? What poison? How is making a different choice than you "poison?"

The only interpretation of the metaphor that is at all topical is that you think systemd is so great that once people have tasted it, they'll refuse to go back. Except, that would be sugaring the well, not poisoning it.

You don't care how other people build their systems, or you do? Which is it. You agree that you don't care, which is obviously the correct answer if you're not trying to strip our freedoms away from us. But then you give a bunch of reasons that seems to be some sort of "but" and where you do actually oppose letting us make our own choices, on account of other people are making the same choices as us, and those people's choices have more impact in the world than your own choice.

Making your own choices doesn't guarantee you the right to be in the majority; if systemd is so bad, you'd have no trouble convincing distros not to use it. Maybe the failure is in the argument; maybe none of the people whining are actually having systemd forced on them, and maybe none of them that are using it are being harmed by it, either.

BTW dbus is the newer, higher level IPC mechanism. If you're whining about the fact that dbus support will be guaranteed to be present in modern systems, that is a losing argument. Anybody with SysV IPC experience knows what a PITA the old ways were; it was so bad that people would write custom networking protocols for process communication instead of wrestling IPC. dbus solves real problems, and if you choose it or not, it is obvious that it is a necessary part of the ecosystem.

I use skype a lot, or rather my wife does, it is the only proprietary software that I rely on. Entirely for their foreign POTS integration; it is way cheaper than international calling cards. I had been totally non-proprietary for years before signing up for their calling service. They did indeed switch directly from supporting both ALSA and OSS to PA-only. You can't blame PulseAudio for that. You just can't. Skype isn't open source, and isn't developed by Poettering. You blame him, by name, for something done by Microsoft programmers, who likely didn't consult him. That is really lame, and you owe everybody an apology for that pathetic drivel. It is rather obvious to everybody that the users would be better off if they had added PulseAudio support and continued the ALSA and OSS support. Skype is really buggy and their auto-levels system will screw up all the system audio settings; it is more reliable to set Skype to OSS support simply because that minimizes the audio capabilities that the low quality client code can try to operate on. The good news is that after turning off the auto-levels feature, the audio works fine.

TFA is clickbait, you're not supposed to actually read that crap. Where the hell do you think you are? You're going to get eaten by a grue-se.

Because... because... the haters on the interwebs said bleepity-bleep! And haters never lie.