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.
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.
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.
Why did you delete the post with system specs, @staircase@programming.dev?
That information would really help people to give you advice and your pc isn’t as unique as you think it is…
Here’s the list
- AMD 9950X
- Deepcool AK620
- MSI B850M GAMING PLUS
- TEAMGROUP 2x32GB DDR5-6000 CL38 Memory
- KIOXIA EXCERIA PLUS G4 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD
- AMD 9060XT 16GB GPU
- Jonsbo D32 PRO MESH MicroATX Case
- Corsair SF850 PSU
- 3x ARCTIC P12 120mm Fan
- 1x ARCTIC P14 140mm Fan
Probably unplug three of those fans and block off the case openings to get some sort of laminar flow.
Switch to a more efficient power supply. Yours is platinum but it may be worth it to look into a list of low standby power units.
Maybe take out half your ram. It probably doesn’t matter though, I’m thinking about the need for lpddr to get past the 1tb barrier on old servers.
The b850 boards will have efficiency settings in the bios that will make the biggest difference.
Before you change anything though I would recommend first putting a watt meter inline and measuring.
Theres a bunch of stuff you can manually do in software but its fractions of a percent and makes your experience very nonstandard.
The biggest thing is probably gonna be turning off the computer when you’re not using it. It’s not like you’re gonna be spinning down a bunch of hdds…
Thanks but not considering hardware adjustments. I’ll look at the bios board efficiency, turning it off, and the wall meter thing
Try chimera Linux, it is very efficient, it doesn’t have any bloat, it is a musl libc distro ( like alpine but they modified the musl to have better performance (they’re saying it can complete or surpass glibc), it isn’t gnu/Linux, they changed the gnu userland to freeBSD userland with the Linux kernel and it is much lighter, they also use dinit instead of systemd and the boot times are very fast. Also the package manager is apk and it is very lightweight and efficient (and very fast)
Do correct me if I’m wrong here, but aren’t those embedded libc only excel in taking less space? I wouldn’t be so sure if they’d be less resource intensive. If any, it may be more, due to the CPU vs memory trade-off.
I didn’t really understand, but I did heard that standard musl is lightweight but the performance is much worse than glibc. But chimera Linux changed the allocator to mimalloc that is bit less light then the standard allocator for musl but still much lighter than glibc. Also it’s performance is very close to glibc and can even beat it sometimes
standard musl is lightweight but the performance is much worse than glibc.
Is it? I never heard this statement before (note not saying its wrong or right, just never read about that). I wonder if that statement is true and if it even matters in most cases. Similar to how performance of Python doesn’t matter for all kind of programs. The main benefit of musl is, it can be embedded into the application to make it standalone without depending on a dynamic library. Its entirely possible the code is not as optimized as glibc, but maybe it depends on the programming language its used and compiled with? Also maybe the stuff you read and heard was from early versions of musl and later they improved it to match glibc. Just speculation, but we don’t have anything else at hand right now.
Maybe you’re right, but to clarify bit what I heard is that musl is slower in heavy tasks, but still, maybe you’re right.
2 things I’m almost sure about are you that musl is lighter than glibc and that the allocator chimera Linux uses have better performance than the standard musl allocator.
I wonder why those optimizations are not part of generalized standard musl library. This (just thinking about it) indicates the optimizations by Chimera Linux are focused on specific performance improvements, while leaving something behind to reach that. What that is, I don’t know, maybe compatibility for edge cases or giving up performance for other tasks.
I’m just a bit cautious with these statements.
Probably there is something you loose if you’ll change to the allocator chimera Linux uses (btw microsoft developed it, I don’t know if it is good that they’re the once that made it but it works, I use chimera Linux with the microsoft) but I don’t now what. All I know that for general purpose pc it works great, the only troubles I got were with software made just for glibc. I’ll be happy to know what I loose when not using the standard allocator for musl, but I don’t know, is there a chance you can check it? thank you giving you point of view, I appreciate it.
Oh I have absolutely no Idea where to check at all. I guess Chimera has a community, its best to ask people who are there and use it and know it or know where to lookup.
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.
I assume Alpine Linux is very limited in terms of power usage, at least out of the box.
Yes but its made for container deployment, it is so bare bones it would be a pain to use as a desktop OS
Alpine Linux is an independent, non-commercial, general purpose Linux distribution designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity and resource efficiency.
https://www.alpinelinux.org/about/
It’s also around for 20 years already, so long before Docker was a thing. But setting it up as a desktop OS would be a bit of work, I agree.
Til
Raspberry Pi with whichever distro would be extremely energy efficient.
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?
part list here https://programming.dev/post/52768664/24715637
I suppose I mean “which is most efficient out of the box?”
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.