Linux

Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power? A whole 60 watts? Are you rationing AA batteries to run your household?

What is it with the bullshit fanciful rationalizations people come up with to consume consume consume?

lowendtalk, hella cheap vps with plenty of resources for most self hosted apps, the issue with it is usually storage space but there are ways around that connecting your drives from elsewhere

Yes actually still sounds good. Raspberry Pis actually have quite high power draw compared to the performance they give. Like sure the number might be smallish but the performance they give and functionality they have is awful compared to even a mini PC which use similar power. Mini PCs btw are actually one of the best options in performance per watt and can still be cheap, plus they have upgradable RAM and storage. A Mac mini is more expensive but will thrash everything else in efficiency and performance per watt, although non-upgradable. Even slightly older laptops will only draw tens of watts when fully charged, vs a desktop or proper server that could pull 100W even at idle in some cases. Older laptops tended to be more upgradable too.

Aren't laptops typically very energy efficient? Low consumption converts to high battery life, which is a priority for laptop hardware.

Some of them consume less than 10W.

I'm not taking electronics advice from someone who uses the term lappies.

There's lots of ways to make existing hardware more efficient at the cost of performance. Under-volting the CPU and RAM (or just putting them in "efficiency" mode) can probably save more electricity than you lose in generational improvements. Considering how much more powerful PCs are compared to SBCs, you'd probably still have better performance than an SBC. Also, a more powerful CPU that takes double the power but as a result can idle for more than 50% of the time would be more efficient than a less powerful CPU never idling.

There's a lot of other variables (like idle power draw, efficiency at various power levels, idle latency, etc), but in general I think your statement would be inaccurate at least 60% of the time.

Do you mean the steam deck?

We must be pretty close on that by now, I can emulate a number of Switch 1 games surprisingly OK (not amazing, just OK) on my S21!

You probably could with a phone

The power aspect is a lot bigger of a factor than I would have thought. I had an old computer I was going to use as a server for Foundry that I could keep up all the time, but when I measured its wattage and did the math, it would cost me $20 a month to keep on. A pi costs like $2 to keep running, so it paid for itself pretty quick

Pi's are ARM-based, which still to this day limits the scope of their applicability.

Also, you should absolutely inspect a laptop before buying. Many, if not most, of old laptops will run just fine for the next few years.

Laptops don't even use that much power. You guys are really not into home labbing or as good with tech as you think you are lol. Lots of people run older real servers and desktops as home servers. They use way more power than laptops. Raspberry Pis sound good but use progressively more power in each generation, and still struggle to compete with mini PCs and even older laptops in performance. They also never had good performance per watt. In performance per watt basically nothing beats a Mac Mini, though other mini PCs are also good. Laptops aren't bad in energy efficiency either. They are literally designed to run on battery so have as little idle draw as possible. They would be comparable to a mini PC if you turn off the display.

Edit: Modern RPis apparently use 25W, which is firmly in the territory of what a laptop would use when not running the screen or charging the battery.

Yeah, theres a lot of old old laptops which make no sense to run. But there's a growing crop of more recent used devices that are only being sold off because they don't support Windows 11, and the power efficiency story changes there. The OOP mentions "8.1 lappies"; my main laptop has a 15W 8th gen which is only in the last year starting to feel less appropriate for desktop use. (And honestly, a RAM and storage bump will probably get me another couple years.)

For environmental concerns, youve got to tax new devices with manufacturing costs as well.

100% agree about VMs though.

Wanna get something like this and a large SSD going forward. Make a silent NAS out of it, and have it in my bedroom without issues.

Fake news. Modern RPis need up to 25W PSU. Even old laptops could idle lower than that, as otherwise they wouldn't be able to get significant battery life. Turning off the screen will also really lower their power consumption.