Greetz
Since thunderstorm season is approaching and I recently moved to a rural location where power outages are moderately common, yesterday I bought an inexpensive UPS for my Main Home Desktop PC.

CyberPower LX1500 Specs

The instructions mentioned software was available on-site and I was pleasantly surprised to discover CyberPower provides a Linux version - PowerPanel-Linux.deb. Actually both 64bit and a 32bit versions are available. Since I run Slackware I just used the "ar" command to strip out the source and "makepkg" to make a .txz package. I sincerely hope this is a preview of things to come where there is an increase in Linux support for even mundane hardware.

For over 15 years now I have chosen hardware carefully and either in the product/warranty registration or a separate communique if the registration form doesn't have a comment section I always mention that I bought their product because of Linux support and that I fully intend to spread the word to get more people considering their product as the Linux Community tends to exhibit substantial loyalty and support for companies that bother to support us. Sometimes I even get a response thanking me for explaining my choice and for spreading the word.

Don't get me wrong. I have never expected nor gotten any remuneration. It is just a policy I created for myself to try to make manufacturers more aware of who their customer base is and that their choice to support Linux is bearing fruit. It was a smart investment. Since most users, especially Windows users, tend to take support for granted as if it were an entitlement and never mention why they made their choice to purchase from that company, I figure it may stand out a little bit and possibly give whomever recommended or pushed for the added effort for Linux support, some ammunition to justify their influence and increase awareness that Linux Users keep track of such things and "pay it forward".

I live in countryside, too. Using sever APC units in my household. I guess the next UPS will be CyberPower, thanks!

Hmmm ... no thanks button for initial post.

I'm happy to report that the software runs beautifully and gives me complete control over the UPS. The documentation was a little lacking as in there is no step-by-step from out-of-the-box to fully operational guidance but it wasn't hard to figure out. All the paper documentation was also available as 3 pdf files so I created a directory for CyberPower and now have complete documentation that cannot be lost and is zoomable on my monitor. I'm quite pleased.

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APC has support as well, just install apcupsd.

Guess what, existence of apcupsd is the exact reason why I'm using APC.

This was one purchase that I really wanted an old school "brick and mortar" store so I looked up BestBuy's offerring of UPSs online and then went in.... to buy a ~400 Joule APC UPS or around $120 USD. They were out of stock so I looked at a $120 CyberPower and saw that it was roughly 20% more wattage and ~900 Joules, more than double. I worried some that even at a 3 year guarantee the "Made in China" thing would bite me in the nether region but it is solidly built (I took it apart to see). I would have preferred the APC simply because it is a more well-known quantity/quality but the exact reason for this thread was that the CyberPower is a happy surprise. It's only a few days old now so it remains to be seen how it will actually perform over time but everything I can check has checked out just fine and I have excellent instrumentation having been in the Electronics business for the better part of 40+ years.

Our company throws away 1500 VA CyberPower units (and we have lots of them), when the battery goes bad they buy a new one. Old one is destroyed. I asked GM why can't they give them away to employees, lots of people would be happy to have them here in hurricane prone area. He said they do not want any legal issues.

Why doesn't your company just replace the batteries? Sounds like the CFO hasn't got a clue.

Correct, they were thinking the unit is bad when it drops the load, while it actually stops working because the battery is dead.

Seems like half the world's problems is that the people who are most convincing, personable and social geniuses end up being leaders but are idiots when it comes to things. Of course the geniuses at "things" often are social idiots with the personality of planks...and no one listens to them. You all know who you are.

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