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Comment by ldev | Hacker News Reader

>And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day.

Yeah Linux attracts some really strange people - why, why, why do you need these monitors? Why do you need conky with your hostname? With your IP? With your kernel version?

Your workstation is not another random server you administrate, so hostname showing is absolutely not required (unless when you sit down in front of a computer you are high as hell and cannot tell it's your computer, or just too stupid to tell which computer it is)...

There are times I need to check CPU usage, but simple eye candy for 12 year olds who watched too much Hacker movies widgets won't help anyways...

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> why, why, why do you need these monitors?

It really pisses me off when I double click to run a program and there's no indication that it's starting up. Seeing CPU spike confirms that it's working. If I had a penny for every time I started a program twice on Windows...

Similar problem when I start some operation in some CPU/HDD intensive program. If the program itself has no progress bar or similar indication I have no clue if it started doing it, or maybe I misclicked.

Similar problem when a browser or another network program seems stuck on a download and I have no clue whether it's the network problem or the program itself is the culprit.

And there are some programs that eat RAM like crazy and on Windows you have no clue when it starts swapping to disk. With monitors you can clearly see that 1. you ran out of RAM and 2. you disk I/O is the cause why the system is slowing down.

I really don't care about hostname or kernel version though. But, I absolutely want to know what's happening in order to use my computer efficiently.

So, you are either using your system inefficiently or you have some beast of a machine with infinite RAM, CPU power and super fast disks.

Not infinite, of course, but with enough. Last time I checked RAM usage was, let me think, 5 years ago?

So those monitors are required if you have 2GB RAM, no SSD and use poorly designed software - seems about right for a linux user, which cannot afford and OS.

I have 16GB of RAM and I need to check usage 2-3 times per week because I run a lot of resource hungry apps. Computers can be used for other stuff, not just running a web browser.

CPU monitor is needed to see if some app is running or not. It's killing me not having that on Windows on a daily basic. For example, starting up Steam takes 5-10 seconds before you get any visual clue that your double-click on the Steam icon was acknowledged. On Linux and Mac I get feedback right away because I can see the CPU and I/O spike.

Yeah CPU monitor gives you an idea of something happening at a glance.

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