A few years ago I installed Linux Mint and later openSuse for a few times on my PC, dual booting with Win 7. I regret to inform you that these installations once damaged the motherboard and twice the graphic cards. So now when I think about dual booting my PC with a Linux distro it worries me. May be the Linux distros need optimizations like producing less heat or some other. If thats the case kindly inform me. Otherwise I would rather install SteamOS instead of the regular distros. At least SteamOS would be more optimized and refined than the other distros.
How? I have never had any hardware problems using Windows. The mentioned problems only occured during the times I installed the above mentioned Linux distros.
For all practical purposes , it is impossible for any software to physically damage hardware . The only ( extreme ) case I could imagine is if you ran stress-testing routines , 24/7 , in which case you may see acute overheating. It would be like " the wrong sort of thinking " putting you in the ER with physical injuries ..... it's never going to happen !
I have used Windows for about 25 years. Now most of those PC's are dead. Especially the PCs from 1990, 1996 and 2003. Windows killed them all. So that's why I now use Linux.
First I wish to clarify that I am serious in what I posted above and I didn't post this just to make fun of you i.e it's not a troll. As all of you think that Linux doesn't damage PC hardware I have no option but to agree with you. May be whatever happened to my PC hardware was a coincident. Anyway there must be utilities and methods to measure system temperature and to control and optimize it for Linux. If you could give me some information for that I would appreciate that.
@winmaniac: It's possible that there might have been a weird combination of hardware / software that may have fried your MoBo. You might have had a spike on the AC line which caused a component to fail. Or possibly a thermal problem which may have occurred simply because it was time. Do You remember the make and model of the computer / MoBo that failed? That would help everyone here to look around and research it further.
It was 5 or 6 years ago. I had two Pentium 4 desktops. Both had Nvidia 5200 graphic cards and the motherboards were intel. Don't remember the model no.
I wouldn't agree with that. Software controls Hardware. For example you can overclock a CPU or GPU until its broken. Or you can adjust the Frequency of an Monitor until.... IMHO years ago there was an virus which destroyed the computer bios. But I fully agree to MrMagic
I have some graphics issues after trying some linux distros over the past 2 weeks that even after I wiped my linux drive, I'm still experencing it. GTX 770 and AMD 990FX board. (Blurry text, pixelized text) I will check if it's maybe a monitor issue that just happened at the same time. Will report back!
Once I tried to install Arch Linux in my Desktop PC, the most geeky (or the dumbest, it is your choice), I couldn't install fan-controllers. The result was that all the fans were spinning and created so much noise ! Luckily nothing was damaged ! I do believe that software can damage hardware. Regards
Well, any modern hardware should have (and usually has) protection circuits and internal firmware, which protects HW against out-of-bounds settings. Software should never EVER brake hardware (not including bugs in SW which make plane crash). It probably just erased BIOS from EEPROM, did not it?