Frugal computing and packaging

I stumbled on a fantastic breakdown of a technical paper about frugal computing. This is a topic I think a lot about as someone who uses a lot of old computers as daily drivers, closely monitors energy usage of our home, and is low income.

The short version is energy usage continues to climb at a rapid pace and the environmental impact of computing should be considered for both hardware and software if we want to reduce emissions and impact global climate change.

What bothers me about hanging out in tech communities is that there is a constant thirst for upgrades and not because they are looking for a specific feature. I routinely see people grouse about “being a long time since they upgraded” or “my machine is showing its age” as a reason to voluntarily upgrade and generate even more e-waste simply because the PC or mobile device they are using feels old.

I don’t think enough pressure is put on developers to reduce the computational requirements of their software, app, or service. Especially when the easy answer is to just throw more hardware at the problems.

Browser too slow because of script-heavy web design? Get more RAM. Low frame rates in a game because of poor game optimization? Get a new GPU.

Rethinking operating systems on my machines

This topic has me thinking more about my the operating systems running on both my desktop and laptop. At the moment I am using Debian 12 with XFCE on the desktop and Cinnamon on the laptop. I’ve been monitoring the resource allocation on both and on these older PCs I know I can do better.

For example, often they are sitting somewhere betwen 1-2 GB of RAM just idling. I know that doesn’t sound like much when modern systems rarely fall below 8 GB of RAM. But, there’s no reason for it to use more. I was testing Antix Linux over the weekend and it would idle around 150-200 MB of RAM, orders of magnitude lower.

I know I’d be giving up features switching from Cinnamon to Fluxbox… Features I mostly don’t use.

Rather than looking for a desktop that has all the bells and whistles, I should be looking to find the best optimized performance for my machines that reduces the power usage. If my primary usecase is the terminal, spreadsheets, and the browser, why do I need such a heavy DE?

Looking at this, it is easy to feel like the solution to a bloated desktop is to simply upgrade my machine instead of the desktop being better optimized.

I’m not calling out the developers here, especially open source devs who provide so much with very little in return. Especially when MacOS and Windows is much, much worse in this regard. Instead I think it is tech in general. We see this with the deprecation things like 32-bit software and ending support for armv7.

Yes, hardware vendors should take a lot of blame here as they stop supporting these old devices. But, we need to do better. There are applications that make hardware upgrades necessary. But, the web browser non-functional on 32-bit OS with 2 GB of RAM? Chat applications? Basic office documents? These are table stakes and should always work.

Packaging

I recently wrote on my desktop uses page that I generally don’t care about application packaging. Native packages, flatpaks, snaps, or AppImages are all fine. All I care about is that its the packaging the developer likes to use.

But as I’ve been reviewing the resource allocation on my machines, I can see that /root is way bigger than I thought. Like on this laptop, I have /root on its own partition and it is using 27-ish GB of storage. However, 14 GB of that is flatpak data. This isn’t even the apps, which are in /home and those take up another 4+ GB of space.

Upgrading hard drives shouldn’t be necessary for just running the OS and about a dozen applications. I know, drives are relatively cheap. But that isn’t the point.

So, now I’m looking harder at not just the operating system, but the app packaging I am using as well. I’m looking at applications that don’t take up so much space and doesn’t need two applications for managing other applications.

For context, the flatpak of Bitwarden has an install size of 330+ MB. The official AppImage is ~107 MB and the CLI version is ~98 MB. This doesn’t include having Flatseal and Warehouse installed to help with managing flatpaks.

Final thoughts

I know this doesn’t cover every use case. New games will require better hardware. Video editing, software development, AI tools, and other jobs will definitely require better hardware.

But the right hardware for the job.

The goal of tech enthusiasts should be to make their stuff last as long as possible, creating software and tools that do what they can to extend the life of any computer.

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