Episode 58: Power Up and Freak Out

A talk at the Linux App Summit about software sustainability -- and the environmental impact of power-hungry code -- was a shocking wake-up call that's too important to ignore. Please give a warm welcome to the creator of that talk, KDE's Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss.

In this episode of Linux For Everyone, we discuss Joseph's vital work with KDE Eco, and the path the project is forging to create a culture of software sustainability and inspire more power-efficient software. Our conversation might dramatically change how you think about the apps you use, and the potentially devastating ecological footprint of the software installed on millions -- if not billions -- of devices.

Joseph and I both hope this episode inspires more conversation and more awareness.To that end, here is a long list of resources and links to help you better understand the situation, and to get directly involved!

• Follow Linux For Everyone @ Mastodon
• ThunderCast: The Official Thunderbird Podcast
• KDE Eco
• The KDE Eco Handbook
• KDE Eco: Get Involved — Links to Matrix channel, mailing list, and repositories.
• The Green Metrics developer tool
• Free and Open Source Energy Efficiency Project (FEEP) Repo
• The Hidden Life Of An Amazon User: Article
• The Hidden Life Of An Amazon User: Interactive Project
• Report: Carbon footprint of unwanted data-use by smartphones
• "Sustainable Programming" online course — (see 04:20–06:10 to go from a one CPU-second reduction to 95 thousand megawatt hours by scaling up). Choice quote: "Often, it is a quite manageable set of decisions which lead to significant differences in power consumption"
• "Post Collapse Computing" Parts 1-4 by Tobias Bernard: — (A 4-part series)
• GUADEC 2020: Carbon emissions by Philip Withnall
• The German Environment Agency report comparing energy consumption of software products — English summary on pages 22-27