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maxmoon @lemmy.ml

The Search for a Sustainable Operating System - Part 1 - Updates vs. Stability vs. Virtualisation

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.

15 comments

  • 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.

  • 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)

    • Have a stable and secure system
    • Have the newest/fanciest updates for a few applications

    This can be done with Fedora. dnf update —security applies security updates only.

    After that you can cherry pick which applications to update. The cherry picking can be accomplished via an Ansible playbook.

    • Does it make sense to only update security packages? Or will it even be unstable after updating everything?

      I don't know what Ansible playbook is, but after doing a little research it just looks overpowered. Wouldn't it be better to have the applications, which must have the fanciest updates in flatpak and than just update flatpak?

      btw. could you delete the redundant posts, please. You accidentally post it 4 times.

      • Does it make sense to only update security packages?

        Yes. "Update for security fixes, and then bump versions only when necessary for features" is how updates are supposed to work, but nobody does this.

        Or will it even be unstable after updating everything?

        RedHat's release engineering is fantastic. I usually give new Fedora releases a month or two before upgrading my work desktop, but normal updates are uneventful.

        Fedora is experimental compared to RHEL, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a moderate distro. It does more testing then Arch, they try to upstream as much as possible, they don't ship software with license or patent problems, and it's a semi-rolling release distro. A few packages are pinned, but most packages get updated as the package maintainer has time, which is usually shortly after release.

        Wouldn’t it be better to have the applications, which must have the fanciest updates in flatpak and than just update flatpak?

        That's up to you. Some people like Flatpak, and some people don't. I also don't know how to only install security updates for Flatpak applications.

        I use a mixture. Some programs aren't packaged as a Flatpak, some are only packaged as a Flatpak, and some are better from the distro package.

        I've run Fedora and RHEL/CentOS for over a decade at this point, and it's been solid. The times things have gotten weird is when I've added 3rd party repos which replace system packages instead of installing into their own path. This problem has mostly been fixed now.

        btw. could you delete the redundant posts, please. You accidentally post it 4 times.

        Yeah. I was posting with Remmel, and it's a little wonky. Four errors, four posts. :\

15 comments