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.
I remember many years ago they experimented with an online OS, which only required a ‘dumb’ PC with an internet connection. In principle, it is not such a bad idea, if it were not that this online OS was centralized and in the hands of a private company. But perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as something decentralized, this would also greatly facilitate collaborations and save enormously on hardware reuse. I don’t know if this would be feasible in any way, there I orient myself to what our experts say here.
So in general it is a remote desktop, right?
If the main hardware is somewhere else and you only have a bare minimum of hardware, just to connect to the better remote machine and show it’s content, I would say it isn’t sustainable at all. Permanently transferring huge data over the internet produces a lot of CO2.
And two computers always have a higher carbon footprint than one. Especially if the one could be a very lightweight system, which has everything to be able to go offline, too (like libreoffice for offline office stuff). And the one remote computer must be online all the time, even if your dumb pc is offline.
But I don’t understand this part: “this would also greatly facilitate collaborations and save enormously on hardware reuse.” Could you explain this a little bit more?
I meant that a lot of people are conected to the same OS, because of this also a collaboration in realtime is very easy. Yn a similar way as a decentralized social netweork, but instead of this an OS. CCurrently tehere are some projects out there for online collaboration, maybe the most complete is the French System D, which I am using (not confuse with systend)- I think this type of service can be improved to a full OS in afuture (it’s FOSS)
ok, I think I get it now. So not only the same hardware can be shared for different desktop environments, but even the same tools to work together. It definitely would be an interesting project, but it would still use a lot of energy, because everyone connected to it have to stream the desktop permanently. Just using a collaboration software would use less energy.
btw. CryptPad is a really cool open source collaboration tool.
Yes, there are also some others. Energy use , if it’s from renevable resource, “green Energy”, isn’t so relevant. Also a server with a normal social network, like Lemmy or others, with a lot of users need a lot of energy, not so relevant if it host a social network or an OS, I think.