[plug] Distro Day !!!

[Craig Ringer]

> I doubt that it's very useful - one of Linux's boasts is that you hardly
> ever have to reboot. If you reboot once a week, it hardly matters whether
> it takes 1 minute or 5 minutes. Just my $0.02.

Honestly, I do think it matters. Linux power management can be a real 
battle, so unless you want to leave your desktop running 24/7 the easy 
way to save power is to turn it off. Also, lots of people are simply in 
the habit of turning off the machine when they're done with it, and this 
does make sense if you're not using the machine overly often.

My home PC guzzles power (3 big fast disks, powerful CPU and video card) 
so I do like to shut it down. Until swsusp or ACPI S4 works more 
smoothly (or works, in the case of S4), it'll keep being turned off most 
nights.

This is unfortunately one place where the newer MS OSs kick the crap out 
of Linux and, AFAIK, all the other UNIXes - power management. Sure, 
Win98 used to be good at suspending but suspend tended to morph into 
'coma' when you tried to boot it back up. More recent OSes however tend 
to have excellent power management. Win2k's hibernate-to-disk is almost 
perfect, and works even in the middle of a 3d game. S3 support is also 
near-perfect. Good ACPI support is helped by the fact that (a) vendors 
implement ACPI for the MS ACPI code, not the standard and (b) hardware 
vendors will talk to Microsoft. Nonetheless, it's a big and important 
thing they've got RIGHT for once.

I'd love to see reliable power management in Linux, but it sure isn't 
there yet. At the moment, boot times matter to anybody who cares about 
their power bill or has environmental concerns about their power 
consumption.

Craig Ringer