Re:Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is no...
by mindslight on Sunday January 15, 2023 @04:48PM
(#34393873)
I feel like this is the all too common pattern of individuals taking environmental responsibility to absurd levels, while corporations dgaf. How much electricity is burned in datacenters, especially doing zero-sum surveillance tasks?
My Ryzen 5700G ("router") idles around 20-25W, which seems like a small price to pay to not be at the mercy of the cloud.
My Libreboot KGPE ("desktop/server") burns about 160W. This is much higher than a contemporary computer should be, but that's the price of freedom. I could replace it with a Talos II (~65W from quick research), but the payback for electricity saved would take several decades.
To cut back on the environmental impact, I do plan to install solar panels with battery storage, which will also replace the need for UPSes. I've got another KGPE board for which it's interesting to think about setting up as a parallel build host, only running during sunny days rather than contributing to electricity storage requirements.
Running something like it on a laptop directly makes sense, but I worry about bringing some workloads back to my laptop that I really prefer to keep off it. In terms of raw performance my laptop isn't even close, especially with heavy graphic workloads. And then there's heat, etc.