Bonum Certa Men Certa

Guest Article: Michael Larabel at Phoronix is Getting Desperate With the Daily Spam

Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original

Summary: Today, Ryan takes a look at Phoronix benchmarks that served to embolden many Microsoft-connected sites which proudly herald Vista 11 is a lot better/faster than "Linux" (we saw many such articles, citing Phoronix); the problem is, Phoronix is comparing apples to oranges (or crude code/misconfigured kernel to a final release), as people already point out in the comments, so this is misleading to say the least and it is part of a pattern which worries us

Phoronix has been a joyless cash grab for a while, but is getting worse.



Not only has Michael Larabel been posting many articles about Windows or Microsoft which aren’t GNU/Linux-related in the slightest and are not of interest to people who want genuine news, but now he resorts to just plain old shitposting.



Moments ago, he declared that Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs have a major performance issue on Linux 5.16.



What’s the problem? There is no Linux 5.16!



Linux 5.15 was released today, and in the article he mentions he tested 5.16-rc1, which no distribution is pushing to their users, and few people other than kernel developers would ever try to compile and run.



In the headline, which I won’t link to, he doesn’t mention that it’s an rc (release candidate) kernel at all. He makes it sound like the sky is falling in on a stable kernel that someone is using in production.



It’s not uncommon, or anything to be alarmed about, that a kernel at this very early stage, might have a bug like this. There’s usually 6-8 release candidates before a stable kernel series goes out, and a week or so passes between them.



Look, I hate Intel as much as anyone, but AMD got caught up in this as well, and it will be fixed before you ever see the 5.16 kernel.



In #techrights we’re starting to call him MicroLarabel because of all of the Microsoft posts.



He has no credibility anymore.



Years ago, I used to read Phoronix because it was always mildly interesting, but now I barely skim over it. This is one example of why.



Another is the Microsoft shitposting.



Another, is if you go in without an ad blocker for whatever reason, you’ll have about 1×1 of screen left and won’t be able to read it anyway.



We live in a world where the US CDC has to warn people not to put condoms in a dishwasher, so even though it goes without saying, don’t put too much faith in Phoronix.



Some people, in the comments, act like this guy is contributing to Linux with his self-serving articles that are just vehicles for ads and Microsoft puff pieces.



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