Linux

A good "rule of thumb" to remember: if your electricity rates average (somewhere near) $0.11/kWh you can take the average power draw of a device in watts and that is equal to what it will cost to run that device 24-7 for 365 days.

So, if that cheap PC draws 50W more than an alternate solution, it's costing you $50 more per year to use it.

Some tasks are beyond any RasPi, but it's well worth evaluating if something like an N100 fanless mini-PC can handle it instead of loading up some Core i7 rig that's going to cost more to run in the first year than the N100 costs to buy.

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?

these shitty win8 laptops are surprisingly low power and efficient though.

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.

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.

As a Pi Hole, the Pi 5 doesn't require active cooling.

Now, I am running a separate Pi 5 with a HAILO 8 for Frigate monitoring of a bunch of video streams, and it does need a little air movement, so I built a box with a 200mm fan pulling through a filter and I just threw all my Pis in there along with the Frigate rig so they stay nice and cool... I'm thinking that I should probably switch Frigate over to a Pi 4 for the h.264 hardware decoder, but the 5 is working fine for my needs and endless tweaking gets boring...

If you have the lid closed, you're looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.

Maybe a little more under high load, but those are going to be intermittent and not constant.

I'm just saying it's not that much more electricity usage, and the recycling more than offsets the CO2.

Consider buying used hardware from an office. Lots of places sell used gear for dirt cheap. A used office desktop with a used GPU from the last 3 years or so would be a massive upgrade without spending much.

Steam Deck is still a good deal for what it is though, but I wouldn't use it as a primary workstation.