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300

CNN: "Switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%."

300 points posted to Advertising and Marketing, Environment by jmxz 12/10/07

IDEAS:


* Dell - if your Environmental PR campaign is anything more than just hype - please make sure these Environmental campaigns emphasize your Linux efforts.

* Also - add this point to your Linux on your "OS Help Me Choose" pages.

Background info:

CNN.com has a great article about electronics related waste.

(CNN) -- True or False: Switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%.

The answer is: TRUE

A UK government study in late 2004 reported that there were substantial green benefits to running a Linux open source operating system (OS) on computers instead of the ubiquitous Windows OS, owned by Microsoft. The main problem with Windows users was that they had to change their computer twice as many times as Linux users, on average, thereby effectively creating twice as much computer-generated e-waste.

The report, titled, "Office of Government Commerce: Open Source Software Trials in Government - Final Report" reported the following:

"There are also potential Green Agenda benefits, through reducing the energy and resources consumed in manufacturing replacement equipment, and reducing landfill requirements and costs arising from disposal of redundant equipment.

"Industry observers quote a typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows systems as 3-4 years; a major UK manufacturing organisation quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years."

(Source: EcoGeek; California Environmental Protection Agency)


Dell - if your Environmental PR campaign is anything more than just hype - please make sure these Environmental campaigns emphasize your Linux efforts.

Also - add this point to your Linux on your "OS Help Me Choose" pages.

fahlenkp
12/10/07		 I firmly disagree. As a shop who maintains 700 Windows PCs, 750 Macs, and 200 linux computers I would say my 11 years of experience speaks differently. I love hearing complaints about one of the smallest costs of a system or the refresh rate changes with OS not because of something logical like budget or performance requirements. We spend more money per mac, and identical $ for the windows/Red Hat boxes. The red hat licenses and our Red Hat sattelite server cost more per machine than Windows costs for Higher ED.

Our refresh rate depends on the use. The linux labs on campus REQUIRE good hardware and are refreshed every 2 years. Not becuase of the OS but because of the engineering, math and biology requirements of the software they host. The windows boxes are replaced every 2-3 years depending on the lab location and use. The OS does NOT dictate a refresh rate. The applications and system requirements to perform at a reasonable pace do. Our political corruption comes in the Mac department where 99% of the time the machines report browser use. We spend more $ per mac than any other system to surf the web. That is another story but a clear illustration of one OS having too much political power.

System administration comes down to the same things with each OS. We have an even distribution of admins for machine numbers vs people. All of the groups have equal tools for imaging, maintenance and monitoring. I live in the real world with a real number of machines and admins. Every once in a while a "grass is greener" argument like this gets attention but people with real experience will tell you that you are a biased OS person. You don't care about the "green" aspects, you care about your favorite OS. 6-8 year life cycle on any computer in the real world is absolutely rediculous. You aren't complaining about the refresh of a machine, You are bashing Windows with no real data.

The key to computing happiness with your users is always going to be buying the best tool for the job. If the customer needs office, get a windows box, if they use pagemaker and photoshop buy macs, if they need custom linux apps, buy really awesome linux or mac boxes. Forcing your favorite OS on someone is not ok. Establish business cases for each scenario based on hard data and choose that way.
aikiwolfie
12/10/07		 In all fairness fahlenkp you're talking from a very specific and specialist point of view. Most people aren't running engineering applications that require the newest hardware. They're word-processing and playing with spreadsheets.

Why are businesses upgrading all the time just to do more word-processing and spreadsheets? What applications are you running on the Macs and the Windows systems?

Your own argument is biased by the fact you haven't given us a fair account of what each type of system is used for. If your only doing Office apps on the Windows system then why change the hardware every 2 to 3 years? Does it suddenly stop working?

IBMs Blue-Gene or whatever it was called wasn't cheap.
sazar
12/10/07		 The study you quote is from 2004.

With current efficiency as shown by intel's processors using various low power stages and being tightly integrated with power management features in Vista and XP, you consume LESS power with Windows Operating systems than Linux, ergo Windows is actually greener than Linux.
jmxz
12/10/07		 sazar:

Uh, but I though Vista's notoriously bad and power inefficiencies: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=462 ...
Yeah, of course Ubuntu's 3D interface sucks power too. If you want power efficiency, I think you should be looking at either XP or Linux with one of the lighter window managers.
aikiwolfie
12/10/07		 How can an OS which makes more efficient use of hardware be more power hungry?
winoffice
12/10/07		 jmxz: "The main problem with Windows users was that they had to change their computer twice as many times"

Not the case with me!
winoffice
12/10/07		 Windows has very easy-to-use power management. If I am not using the computer, I just place it on standby or hibernation. If I need to replace the computer, I recycle the old one. Oh, and as you yourself noted, the "study" is from 2004. And Ubuntu's 3D interface sucks power just as Vista's does, like you yourself noted...and with Ubuntu being the Linux OS that Dell preinstalls, this is a lie.

And this idea bashes Windows...DEMOTED.
aikiwolfie
12/11/07		 Linux has very very very easy to use power management! Seriously how hard can it be to toggle the power management features?

A side from stand-by and hibernation Linux has all the other power management features you'd expect to find on a modern desktop PC. However with that said if I'm not going to be using the PC for half an hour or more I just switch it off. Which trumps stand-by and hibernation any day of the week in terms of power savings.

If you're not using your PC turn it off! What better power management do you need?
jmxz
12/11/07		 "aside from stand-by and hibernation"? and without the d*mn nvidia driver, even those work on my computer.
Funny that bootup time is just as fast as unhibernate time for me,

"If you're not using your PC turn it off! What better power management do you need?"

I want one that turns on every night to run it's cron jobs; and then shut itself back down when it's done.
kara_k
12/11/07		 @jmxz: You idea seems interesting but gets lost among CNN's opinion. Maybe you can put your idea before the article so other community members will not think this is just a news article. Just a thought.
aikiwolfie
12/11/07		 jmxz my XPS 700 has an auto turn on feature in the BIOS. It can be set for everyday, weekdays or weekends.
jmxz
12/11/07		 @kara_k:

Thanks for the feedback. I edited the Idea posting.
winoffice
12/11/07		 aikiwolfie: when I do not use my computers but am not yet ready to turn them off, I hibernate them. In Windows, "hibernation" is the same as turning off except that the current system state (applications, desktop, so on) is stored on the hard drive and retrieved when resumed from hibernation. And I do not think that Linux power management is any easier than Windows power management (but of course, the comparison depends on the distribution that one is talking about).
aikiwolfie
12/12/07		 My only experience with Windows hibernation is with XP and it's never worked twice in the same day. Even though I have 1.5TB of hard drive space. So I don't use it in Windows.

You're right though. Linux power management isn't any easier than Windows power management. They're both almost exactly the same. Except the hibernation works in Ubuntu.
jmxz
12/12/07		 @aikiwolfie: "Except the hibernation works in Ubuntu."
Unless you have the d*mn nVidia proprietary driver. [had to mention it again just in case someone from nVidia lurks here]
aikiwolfie
12/12/07		 I do have the nvidia driver. It still works.
aikiwolfie
12/12/07		 edit ... stupid slow servers ... Dell needs an upgrade!
jmxz
12/12/07		 @aikiwolfie:
Good to know - looks like I should make sure I have the latest updates and re-enable it. Googling I see lots of references to having to do things like edit /etc/default/acpi-support and doing things like setting "POST_VIDEO=true" and/or "POST_VBE_STATE=true", etc. Would you remember if you had done any such things manually?
ubondell
12/13/07		 I have a challenge for the Windows folk. Get Windows to run on one of these: www.gumstix.org ***

According to http://docwiki.gumstix.org/Frequently_asked_questions/Heat_and_power the 200MHz computer runs at 100% activity on only 120mA at 4.5V (that means a set of 4 AA NiMH cells could run it for about a day). It is a self contained Linux computer (2.6 kernel) with 64MB RAM plus 16MB Flash, a 10/100 Ethernet connector, and accepts a Type II CF card for $189. What version of XP or Vista would run on that? My math says that I could expect to run that 24/7 for about $1 per year in electricity. The thing makes an excellent micro-server.

The biggest e-Waste savings is that you can take the Window-based HW that people are ready to toss and run the latest Ubuntu/Linux on it and have a system that outperforms the new PC they are buying to replace it. My son has a side business of converting not so new laptops from Windows to Ubuntu. He tars the data files off to a scratch drive and then reformats the drive with Ubuntu and reloads the data. Everyone he does it for feels like they got a new laptop.

The real 'waste' with Windows is that you need to junk HW that is still fully functional because Microsoft decides to stop fixing security flaws. That and the fact that you need a 2+GHZ dual-core processor with 2GB of DRAM to get Windows Vista to run well (just look at what Dell recommends!). The most you need to get a very adequate Linux PC is a 500MHz single core CPU with 256MB of DRAM. Sure that's not the gamers uber system, but does all the typical things that you need a PC for: email, web surf, spreadsheets, picture editing, etc. Personally I run my Ubuntu Linux on a 2.2GHz C2D with 2GB of RAM. Image processing on that just screams.
aikiwolfie
12/13/07		 @jmxz: I would remember and no I didn't change anything. I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) on an XPS 700. No tweaks or changes or hacks of any kind.
sazar
12/13/07		 @ jmxz, I see no difference in power consumption with Vista v/s XP on my Latitude D-620. I have more ability to control portions of my systems power requirements than XP. Naturally if people want to go ahead and use their systems all out than they can certainly use their batteries faster. However when the system is powered (not on batteries) there is no discernible difference and infact the additional power states available help out.

A linux system will not have varied power states and typically will consume the same amount of power, or more regardless of work-load. A windows based system with any modern processor has the ability to dynamically control the processor clocks required for tasks.

@ ubondell, if my requirements were purely to run my system for tasks like that system is built for, I would have no problems trying to find and use applications that worked with it.

Unfortunately, with my gaming and video editing needs, I sort of NEED some additional processing power :)
jmxz
12/13/07		 @sazar:

I thought the article was talking mostly about the refresh cycles of the hardware; where staying on a supported Windows version is more costly because it forces more hardware upgrades; and the waste isn't electricity but circuit boards, etc.
ubondell
12/13/07		 @sazar: My Dell is running Linux now and the fan is rarely on. When it ran Windows the fan ran most of the time; I think it was because of all the stupid background tasks that I didn't need, but was afraid to terminate. BTW, it is nice that you need Windows for games and video editing, but a Linux PC running chip synthesis and verification SW is what puts dinner on the table for me.
aikiwolfie
12/14/07		 sazar who told you Linux doesn't have varied power states?
sazar
12/18/07		 @ Aiki, I never said Linux didn't have varied power states. I said that at the moment, Windows based OS's seem to have better power-management features than Linux based OS's.
sazar
12/18/07		 @ jmxz, this is a possibility but even then you have to think about assosciated costs of products, training and others, including support.

These add up and when you look at it, there is not much, if any cost benefit assosciated with Linux. If anything, in some situations, it would cost more to go that route.
ubondell
12/19/07		 @sazar - No cost benefit with Linux? How about a built-in package repository where you can find applications to do just about anything that a home PC user would want to do. They are all F/OSS so there is no cost to install them, which is just a one click operation, and once installed the Ubuntu update manager loads any updates that are released, It is much simpler, and offers much higher security than Windows, since you are installing from a known source and all updates for security issues are pushed through a single portal as they become available, even though virus/spyware is less of an issue on Linux since it isn't as vulnerable as Windows with IE/Active-X and Outlook.
sazar
12/19/07		 Ubondell, re-read my posts. The point is the full package, whether it be Windows or Linux based will have costs associated which, in the grand scheme of things, will be similar.

If there are cost savings in one niche, there are increased costs in another thing.
aikiwolfie
12/19/07		 @sazar: Actually you did on the 13 Dec.

"A linux system will not have varied power states and typically will consume the same amount of power, or more regardless of work-load. A windows based system with any modern processor has the ability to dynamically control the processor clocks required for tasks."
sazar
12/19/07		 My apologies in that case. That was not my intention.
jorge
Jan 29		 Its a Dupe, I posted this in my Vista causes global warming Idea.
jmxz
Jan 29		 Is it a dup? I thought one was about power consumption, the other about thrown out old hardware.
jorge
Jan 30		 No its about waste on both.
jmxz
Jan 30		 cool. that makes sense.
greymack
Apr 20		 There are users who will admit buying a new PC because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with the old one, and didn't want to take it somewhere for service just to get ripped off. There are probably many more who just won't admit it. Lacking proficiency, these user's can't configure Windows for efficient and reliable operation or approach Linux at all. New PC = fresh start, problem solved.

How many watt-hours could be saved if we all just disable scripts and block ad-servers? There must be some energy required to push them electrons around, and there seem to be a lot that are totally unnecessary.
 
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