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.
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.
Yes, massively. At least with current data, I don’t imagine it would even be possible to measure this on a large scale, especially given the variation in what a computer is actually trying to do. I think it’s made even harder by the fact that software is often targetted at Windows or OSX rather than Linux, so even benchmarking software is near impossible unless you’re writing software which is able to leverage the specific unique features of Linux which make it more opimized.
Linux, so even benchmarking software is near impossible unless you’re writing software which is able to leverage the specific unique features of Linux which make it more opimized.
True. I have no doubt that you could set up a linux system to calculate pi to 10 million digits (or something similar) more power efficiently than windows-based system, but that would include compiling your own kernel leaving out everything unnecesary for that particular system, shutting down a ton of daemons which is commonly run on a typical desktop and so on and waste a ton more power on testing that you could never save. And that might not even be faster, just less power hungry, but no matter what that would be far far away from any real world scenario and instead be a competition to build a hardware and software to do that very spesific thing with as little power as possible.
I think the other difficulty would be the requirement of knowing both Linux and Windows through-and-through to ensure the code you’re writing is leveraging all the os-specific advantages. But yes, it’s definitely an interesting hypothetical.
At least with AMD on Wayland, gpu offloading works seamlessly. But I’m not sure if the GPU is actually powered off when I’m not using it; my use case is an egpu rather than a dual GPU laptop so I don’t notice battery from it. I don’t know what the situation is with Nvidia or xorg
i don’t have any stake in this, i’m a fucking xfce user lmao, but man “hyprland” is not a very great name since it immediately makes me think it’s a crypto bullshit project…
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 remember my laptop draining under an hour, thanks to the crappy Nvidia Optimus on X11, and the unbearable screen-tearing. This was during the time when I was using Fedora. I moved over to Wayland, without the nonfree drivers, because that was way more emery-efficient, and had my battery lasting for quite a long time.
Yes, I probably should have rephrased that as “are often more efficient” rather than implying that this is always the case. I do think, and I mentioned this somewhere else, though, that it’s quite a hard comparison to make. I’d probably make the argument that if the driver itself was the issue, making the driver open-source would likely (and that’s a “likely” going off an assumption which I can’t back up) be more efficient.
Generally speaking, my point does still apply for fully open-source software which has been developed specifically for Linux. Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing much mainstream Linux-bespoke software for a while, at least not until the year of the Linux desktop finally arrives.
I completely agree with what you’re saying, though.
just pick one don’t overwhelm yourself with choices. testing out different software is part of the experience just be prepared for possible migration. currently I’m using hyprland and I’m happy with it but for Xorg/X11 i3 is a fine choice.
Yep, got Timeshift hooked up to make a snapshot each time I update my system and I can boot into them via GRUB. Haven’t needed that so far, thankfully, but it’s there just in case.
Try Niri (a linear window manager), I have tried it already for a short time on a seperate computer. It is very good! I just not got around configuring it for my main machine, yet.
And I need to test how well Xwayland works, because I need it for Steam and some games.
My recommendation is to just try bunch of them and see which one fits your needs or you like using the most.
Try both manual tiling and auto tiling for both X11 and Wayland, one will eventually stick.
I started with AwesomeWM, then tried bunch of other ones , and to my surprise, I found myself using DWM (flexipatch) the most. I’m planning to transition to Hyprland soon.
Just use what you like and don’t pay much attention about the reviews.
Well, as far as I know, BTRFS and ZFS are the recommended file systems for NAS’s. They have self-healing capabilities so I can be slightly more sure that my data does not get corrupted over time.
I don’t dual boot, I just have some other Windows machines that I use rarely for Windows-only software that require an external connection, like Odin for Samsung devices.
One thing I like to have with me is the AppImage version of programs when possible, since they usually work out of the box. Also helps ensuring I don’t depend on the availability of whatever package manager the system uses.
Do they also embed the configuration inside of them? But for many dependencies and binaries I don’t think that would be a good case scenario compared to package manager.
There are cases where AppImages aren’t viable indeed, like with programs that require ring 0 access. But limitations exist for all formats, so perhaps another good alternative is having multiple versions of a given program, like downloading the equivalent deb package through apt while also keeping the appimage version. It would bloat the storage for a potential automated configuration, but it should help with ensuring compatibility.
chezmoi does basically that, without actually making your home dir a git repo, it just syncs it. It also supports templating and per-machine differences. Pretty cool really.
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