News Microsoft's cancelled February Patch Tuesday releases rolled into March

I don't use any m'self, but typing 'sensors' at the terminal should give you something like the following:

Code:

blacklaw@trioptimum[~]$ sensors
it8728-isa-0228
Adapter: ISA adapter
in0:          +0.98 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
in1:          +1.48 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
in2:          +2.03 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
in3:          +1.99 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
in4:          +1.99 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
in5:          +2.22 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
in6:          +2.22 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.06 V)
3VSB:         +3.34 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +6.12 V)
Vbat:         +3.31 V  
fan1:        1099 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan2:           0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan3:           0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan4:           0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan5:           0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
temp1:        +27.0°C  (low  = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
temp2:         -8.0°C  (low  = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
temp3:        +17.0°C  (low  = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)  sensor = Intel PECI
intrusion0:  OK

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:         +3.1°C  (high = +70.0°C)
                       (crit = +80.0°C, hyst = +79.0°C)

I'm not sure if Ubuntu comes with the tool pre-installed these days. If not, this'll get you up and running.

If you're looking for something which offers control, try installing 'fancontrol' then running 'pwmconfig' at the terminal - it'll find all the PWM outputs on your motherboard, find out which fans they control, and even generate a plot of what duty cycles correspond to what fan speeds, then let you configure your fan profiles as you like. It's a CLI app, but very powerful.

If you want something equivalent to Rainmeter on Linux you'll be looking at Conky. Takes a bit of setting up, but it's stupid-powerful.

Hah! That's altogether too damn smart! I'll have never noticed that 'feature,' 'cos my speakers are always plugged in.

 

Effectively, it's all down to the compiler. Using the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) as my example, 'cos that's what I use, you can use a series of flags to tell it to optimise for this, that, or the other. The default setting is to compile in such a way to maximise compatibility with other processors sharing the same architecture and to make debugging as easy as possible. You can use flags to override these defaults, in order to compile with a focus on speed or binary size.

Compiling with the -O2 flag, for instance, compiles for speed while retaining standards compliance. Compiling with -O3 turns on additional speed optimisations which may, in some cases, veer a little outside the official standards. Compiling with -Ofast turns on even more optimisations which are definitely outside the official standards and may, therefore, make the program do something odd under certain circumstances - or may work absolutely perfectly.

Then there's the -march=native flag, which tells gcc what microarchitecture to target - in this case, the microarchitecture of whatever processor you're currently running gcc on. Using that, it might opt to use processor features not present in other microarchitectures - improving performance but making it so the binary doesn't work properly on a different microarchitecture (working on Piledriver but not Bulldozer, for example, or Skylake but not Ivy Bridge.)

There are even more flags - such as -flto, for link-time optimisation - and unless you know the program you're compiling intimately there's no easy way of guessing what might help or harm performance without trying it out. Compiling with "-Ofast -march=native -flto" (and maybe throwing a quick -funsafe-math-optimizations if you're confident it won't break anything) is usually a good way to get a decent speed boost, though.

Then you can get really clever and compile the program in such a way that it generates information which can then be used to optimise a second compilation run...

The Gentoo wiki has a good run-down of the most common flags. Remember, though, that you don't have to do this to run Linux; you can just download precompiled binaries and use them straight off the bat, just as in Windows. If you can be bothered, though, you'll almost always win a performance boost if you compile from source.