Energy-efficient distro recommendations?
2026-06-29 23:35 UTC
Replies (14)
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@superweeniehutjrs@lemmy.world 2026-06-29 23:49
Most of the tweaks I’ve done for efficiency can be done on any distro.
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@NM_Gringo@lemmy.world 2026-06-30 00:27
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.
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@undrwater@lemmy.world 2026-06-30 01:21
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.
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@yaroto98@lemmy.world 2026-06-30 02:00
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.
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@jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 2026-06-30 02:33
The distro doesn’t really matter. Buying more efficient hardware and running efficient software matters. If you really want to know how much power the desktop is using, measure. Measure the power coming out of the wal. Measure how much time the system is active, and feed that into a time series database with a something like Grafana for visualizations.
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@hexagonwin@lemmy.today 2026-06-30 03:03
only enable necessary services, disable turboboost, switch cpu governors (like powersave)
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@onlinepersona@programming.dev 2026-06-30 05:54
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.
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@sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2026-06-30 08:25
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.
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@Knoxvomica@lemmy.ca 2026-06-30 10:04
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.
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@Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.world 2026-06-30 10:25
Raspberry Pi with whichever distro would be extremely energy efficient.
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@whatiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml 2026-06-30 19:44
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.
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@Lemmchen@feddit.org 2026-06-30 23:19
I assume Alpine Linux is very limited in terms of power usage, at least out of the box.
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@dfgxx@lemmy.zip 2026-07-01 04:54
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)
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@whatiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml 2026-07-01 20:35
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…