I want to find the most sustainable operating system, because computers nowadays waste a lot of energy, because of data collection and data processing. Avoiding unnecessary processes and using resources in a mindful way could reduce the CO2 output on the whole world.
This discussion grew very fast and I put all links to other platforms in the end of the blog article.
Interesting thoughts. I very recently considered this issue too. As Gentoo user I had to recompile software on updates which took sometimes a whole battery charge for large packets such as LLVM or rustc. Finally I decided to drop it in favor of Debian—the ecological aspect is more important to me than some minor tweaks after all.
After discussion this topic for days, now, I’ve decided that my next operating system will be Debian (stable). And if I need a newer package for a software, I still could use flatpak (or similar). Someone even told me that Signal-Desktop (over flatpak) only used so much cpu, because it was bad configured. Maybe this will be different with Debian.
And a very good point is using the right hardware. Switching to ARM could save a lot of energy. But there are even more aspects I’ve learnt and I haven’t even thought about, but this will be in the next parts of the blog series.
Backports may be an option sometimes, but I don’t recommend abuse of it, since will replace current versions of stable stable-security and stable-updates by it and could cause some issues with other packages.
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I use i3wm and want to test dwm, because it uses much less resources than i3wm or awesomewm, but might do everything I want. Desktop environments are using a lot of energy, but it might be interesting to figure out which one uses less, just to have a good recommendation for people who need a DE. My guess would be XFCE, but it’s only a theory, because I think it’s the smallest one without bloat software.
The OS you are using does matter a lot if it’s about sustainability (co2 emissions). If everyone would leave Windows and use a lightweight Linux, the energy consumption would be almost halved over night and that’s only the energy, which would have been saved by the workstations. Avoiding Microsoft or other big companies can save much more energy, but more about this in my next blog article.
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Okay, I haven’t used a DE for years and shouldn’t create theories about them. XFCE was just one of the most light DEs back then, but nowadays were are so many new ones, I’ve never seen in action.
Thanks for this useful link! I will definitely use it in my work.
A few days ago someone mentioned a link to a website with the resource usage of window managers in a forum, but I can’t find it anymore. I will post it here, if I will find it again, just to complete the numbers.
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