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?)
Stop reading this thread and buy this thing or something like it.
There are at least three things in between the wall and what the os tries to do before you start fiddling around in the settings. Did the thing you changed take effect? Did it stay in effect? Is the cpu actually doing what you ask it? Can you even trust what the cpu is reporting back to you? The motherboard?
Don’t just start fucking around with stuff before you put a watt meter in line. Everything else is just guesswork.
I assume Alpine Linux is very limited in terms of power usage, at least out of the box.
So I do suggest you get some sort of energy monitor plug for your desktop and realize that it probably already uses less power than you think it does. I was very surprised at the efficiency once I did that.
very surprised at the efficiency
i remember hooking ours up to a 10th gen celeron desktop (supposedly 58w cpu).
the whole box doesn’t even hit 20w at the wall under a full load, and it idles awake at about 5w.
i immediately set that one aside for future use to feed media to a tv or run a dietpi or something.
OS matters, linux is probably the most efficient. The distribution matters less. But it also depends on what you want to do. Use it as a desktop?
As others have said, disable services you don’t need, close programs you aren’t using.
Actually that does make me think, there might be distros that automatically clean up unused programs and turn down the frequency of the CPU when it’s not in use. Haven’t done a thorough search though.
Raspberry Pi with whichever distro would be extremely energy efficient.
Most of the tweaks I’ve done for efficiency can be done on any distro.
IDK what exactly your goal is, but with distros like Arch, background services are opt-in and there’s documentation on fine-tuning the power settings.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
