Which distros are energy efficient? I have a capable desktop, and I mean to push it, but I don’t want to be using energy if it’s not necessary. I’m not looking to rescue an old laptop, for example.
I hear CachyOS is fast. Does that translate to energy efficient?
(Does the OS even matter that much for efficiency?)
I guess whatever distro uses the least resources.
The power difference is going to be negligible though. Unless you’re running a pentium 4 and all you do is boot the OS, check mail, then shut it down you’d never notice a difference. As soon as you open a web browser any savings goes out the window. The web will destroy any savings a distro has.
Also performant doesn’t necessarily mean more efficient. It could mean it better utilizes the hardware, but because it’s using more of the hardware it’s using more power.
only enable necessary services, disable turboboost, switch cpu governors (like powersave)
The distro doesn’t really matter. Buying more efficient hardware and running efficient software matters.
A 65w proc is going to use less electricity then a 240w proc. Native software is more efficient then running lots of web browsers.
If you really want to know how much power the desktop is using, measure. Measure the power coming out of the wall. Measure how much time the system is active, and feed that into a time series database with a something like Grafana for visualizations.
Stop services you don’t need. Doesn’t matter the distro.
You can also turn off devices right at the bus.
Powertop is a great tool.
Any of them really, there should be very little difference between distros on the latest kernels.
Most of the tweaks I’ve done for efficiency can be done on any distro.
There is no such thing in the way you’re imagining it. You can tune any distro to use as little power as possible, but there’s only so much you can do if the hardware platform you’re running isn’t very efficient.
What are you currently running?
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Nobody was really answering, but steamos makes tweaking the effeciency easy. It should be like the steam deck where you can tweak the tdp limit for the cpu and setting clock speed for the gpu. I believe this currently only works with amd cpu/gpu, but I believe they’re working with nvidia.
I have Ubuntu running with a sound bar and monitor that only pulls 40 watts. My processor is one of those vanilla box mini computers…GMKTech. I’m able to run it off a 1 kwh solar power station and it lasts a laughably long time. How much more efficiency do you need? I have fans that use more power than my desktop.
