I recently discovered that bad software can really cause hardware to fail. I switched from using the proprietary AMD fglrx drivers to the open source radeon driver a few years back. For some time, my notebook has been running pretty hot after being powered on for a few hours, even when idle. I always put this down to a dust-blocked heat sink. When the problem persisted after cleaning out the fan and heatsink and replacing the thermal grease, I started to research other causes. Turns out that clock gating, a technique that clocks down the gpu when it is idle in order to save power and reduce heat output, is disabled by default in the open source radeon driver [1]. However, I discovered this too late - the constant overheating has already seems to have damaged the gpu to the point where random color artifacts appear on the screen and the system will freeze after being powered on for a few hours.
So as it turns out, Linux may really be bad for your hardware. Still, there's no way I'm going to stick with Windows on my new notebook.
Linux is not bad for your hardware, misconfiguration is bad for your hardware.
Annecdotally, heavy graphic card use on any laptop (yes even running windows) will cause a heat death in a shorter ammuont of time than normally expected.
No, in this case, Linux really is bad for your hardware. Reading gp's wiki link, it would seem the feature to clock down the GPU is disabled by default because it's still a work in progress. That would mean that although it works in a lot of cases, it's not yet truly dependable. And if it's not yet truly dependable, then it's not able to dependably care for the hardware in the best way possible. And as such, Linux can be bad for your hardware, though it isn't always.
Any rebuttal you might throw at this reality would make me to look at you more and more like this. :)
Per your claim, some driver for some piece of hardware has a disabled feature which you can use to mess up your hardware.
So why don't you just freaking avoid enabling that feature?
Is it Linux's responsibility to absolutely prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot after taking very special effort to research the best way to blow it off?
Question: does OS X fully support every possible bit of hardware which you can technically make to run with it, with every feature you want? Is it absolutely impossible to shoot yourself in the foot with OS X?
So as it turns out, Linux may really be bad for your hardware. Still, there's no way I'm going to stick with Windows on my new notebook.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#Powersaving