Linux

It's generally considered a fact that Linux, along with many other open-source software projects, are more efficient than their propriety closed-source counterparts

This is not necessarily true. Linux had trouble with Nvidia Optimus, which is a GPU technology that seamlessly switches between power modes. Well, that is if it works properly, which it didn’t for Linux. I haven’t heard it in a while, so I assume it’s not a problem now anymore.

But it was a big problem where Linux laptops drained batteries much faster because they were using the GPUs at max capacity at all times.

What I’m saying is that the efficiency of Linux depends on access to hardware features, and that might depend on the vendors of the drivers.

Also, like it or not, if there’s one thing I envy about Mac is its power efficiency. They usually last really long on one charge.

I wonder how this calculus changes with the dawn of AI built into the OS... will a Linux system that avoids all that nonsense end up being more energy efficient?

My Thinkpad that would have run 8 hours with Windows 7 runs 10 hours with Linux, despite the battery getting old.

Energy efficiency can be offset by extra computational ability though.

Eg Linux has a plethora of CPU and IO schedulers and allows you to tune the system to maximise performance for your particular workload. Getting more performance than with the generic CPU and IO schedulers provided in other OS's generally means more power consumption, unless you do some sort of "performance per watt" calculation to take that into account.

Linux used to be terrible in terms of battery life. However, that has changed significantly.

Maybe the EU should pass some regulations that require hardware manufacturers to open source the drivers for power saving on linux?

How is the situation for modern desktop hardware like Intel 12000 series or AMD? Is there any problems there? I'd like to build a low power desktop PC with linux that can still game.

One large factory or hospital uses more power in a day than most people will use over the course of a year or maybe more. In many cases more than all Linux users combined lol. It’s astonishing. Same goes for waste production, pollution etc. It is those places where energy consumption and waste need to change drastically.

How much energy does Windows waste on serving ads and other useless nonsense? What's does the glut-o-meter say?

Interesting thought indeed, but I highly doubt that difference is anything you could measure and there's a ton of contributing factors, like what kind of services are running on a given host. So, in order to get a reasonable comparison you should run multiple different software with pretty much identical usage patterns on both operating systems to get any kind of comparable results.

Also, the hardware support plays a big part. A laptop with dual GPUs and a "perfect" support from drivers on Windows would absolutely wipe the floor with Linux which couldn't switch GPUs at the fly (I don't know how well that scenario is supported on linux today). Same with multicore-cpu's and their efficient usage, but I think on that the operating system plays a lot smaller role.

However changes in hardware, like ARM CPUs, would make a huge difference globally, and at least traditionally that's the part where linux shines on compatibility and why Macs run on batteries for longer. But in the reality, if we could squeeze more of our CPU cycles globally to do stuff more efficiently we'd just throw more stuff on them and still consume more power.

Back when cellphones (and other rechargeable things) became mainstream their chargers were so unefficient that unplugging them actually made sense, but today our USB-bricks consume next to nothing when they're idle so it doesn't really matter.

My laptop came with win11 preinstalled... I used it like that for about 4 months. I can very confidently say installing Linux increased the battery duration of my laptop by about 20%.

I'm a big fan of the idea of efficient computing, and I think we'd see more power savings at the End Users based on hardware. I don't need an intel i9-nteen50 and a Geforce 4090 to mindlessly ingest videos or browse lemmy. In fact, I could get away with that using less power than my phone uses; we really should move to the ARM model of low power cores suitable for most tasks and performance cores that only turn on when necessary. Pair that with less bloatware and you're getting maximum performance per instruction run.

SoCs also have the benefit of power efficient GPU and memory, while standardizing hardware so programmers can optimize to the platform again instead of getting lost in APIs and driver bloat.

The only downside is the difficulty of upgrading hardware, but CPUs (and GPUs) are basically blackboxes to the End User already and no one complains about not being able to upgrade just the L1 cache (or vram).

Imagine a future where most end user MOBOs are essentially just a socket for a socketed-SoC standard, some m.2 ports, and of course the PCI slots (with the usual hardwired ports for peripherals). Desktops/laptops would generate less waste heat, computers would use less electricity, graphical software developement would be less of a fustercluck (imagine the manhours saved), there'd be less e-waste (imagine not needing a new mobo for the new chipset if you want to upgrade your cpu after 5 years), you'd be able to upgrade laptop PUs.

Of course the actual implementation of such a standard would necessarily get fuckered by competing interests and people who only want to see the numbers go up (both profit-wise and performance-wise) and we'd be back where we are now... But a gal can dream.

I think LF Energy published a report on how open source is more sustainable. Although, I don't quite remember the details of the report, it was more focused on sustainable projects not linux and such. If you are interested you can find more studies that explore the idea more quantitatively.

Couldn't you just compare the energy usage of Laptops or desktop PCs with native support running Linux compared to the energy usage when running Windows on them? I have a PC with an AMD GPU and CPU so my hardware is fully supported, I could actually test it. I think a laptop would be better to test on tho, since a desktop PC might not be trying to use as little power as possible in the first place.