I actually had an offer from my advisor to study for a PhD under him by basically taking on a major coding project to develop a non toxic format of social media, or at least to get as close to that as possible. I also remember it involving some non crypto uses of blockchain software potentially but my prof was more interested in the complex web development aspects of it and actually got my web design professor in on pitching the potential for it to me.
We had me enroll in a master’s level web design class to trial run it, and it turned out I wasn’t the webcode wunderkind they thought I might be given my good web design work for my courses so far. I’m creative but not a savant basically. We all agreed that my PhD potential was best sought after more design experience got under my belt.
I thought the whole deal with PhDs was that they were supposed to be new research that pushes the field forward. What field were you studying? What was the academic contribution the prof was expecting?
Software Engineering, and it was more intended as a build project than as an academic venture. We would basically have been setting out to strip out all the addiction features Social Media is built with and see what can be built with what’s left and what new ideas can make it a good experience for the user without queuing them for ranked rage fest matches against whoever else is in the comment section they clicked on in the rage bait article.
If I'm running another Linux distro that will be happy under the host kernel then I use LXD (or Incus) containers. Otherwise it's QEMU+KVM or occasionally Virtual Box.
I lived in Spain for a while. I was in some random city in Andalucía, walking with some random person I met in the hostel. We’re walking to the beach, and we pass a group of students coming the other way. Kinda passively scanning the faces, I see this kid I went to high school with. We weren’t friends, but it was a small school, 100 kids or so to a class. We both just kinda laugh, shake our heads, point at each other, share a dap as we pass and both just kept walking. Neither of us said anything except maybe “what the fuck”
lol neither of us stopped, just passed each other in disbelief
Another time, I got in a hit and run accident. When the guy hit me from behind, I looked in the rear view and saw his weird headlights. We go to pull off the road and he booked it. I couldn’t catch him. Like six months down the road, on my way home from school, I look in my rear view and see those headlights on the same color truck. He’s driving like a dickhead through traffic, but I start obviously following him, he’s kinda trying to shake me. He pulls over into a parking lot, I come in behind him. He and his douchey friend get out, all douchey-like. Comes to my window, trying to intimidate me, his friend to the passenger window to intimidate my friend. Starts yelling, and I’m just like, “yeah, like six months ago you rear ended me and I got a description of your truck for the police report, but didn’t get the license plate number.” He was immediately shaken and started stumbling on his words, trying to say he just bought this car, blah blah. I’m like, “oh. They kept those Ron Jon stickers on the window when they sold it?” lol at that point they were already retreating. I yell, “you can expect a visit from the cops pretty soon!” And they got out of there. I didn’t really make a police report, but I hope I made the next few months of his life really anxious.
Another time a guy who tried to stab me like three nights before when I was living in Colombia came up and started talking to a group of me and my friends on the street.
Couldn’t you just compare the energy usage of Laptops or desktop PCs with native support running Linux compared to the energy usage when running Windows on them? I have a PC with an AMD GPU and CPU so my hardware is fully supported, I could actually test it. I think a laptop would be better to test on tho, since a desktop PC might not be trying to use as little power as possible in the first place.
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).
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
Energy efficiency can be offset by extra computational ability though.
Eg Linux has a plethora of CPU and IO schedulers and allows you to tune the system to maximise performance for your particular workload. Getting more performance than with the generic CPU and IO schedulers provided in other OS’s generally means more power consumption, unless you do some sort of “performance per watt” calculation to take that into account.
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