There are many reasons why one might be drawn to free software, open hardware, and expanding the right to repair. I have several reasons that stick out particularly strongly in my mind, but one of the greatest reasons is environmental.

When it comes to the tech we use every day, the most significant personal environmental impact you can have is to avoid buying replacement devices unnecessarily, and keeping older devices up and running for as long as possible. The longer we can keep devices out of landfills and e-waste centers, the bigger the overall win for the environment.

That said, I’m sometimes a bit disappointed by the ongoing environmental efforts in the open source world. I was recently made aware of the KDE Eco project, which has laudable goals. The project is designed to make developers aware of the energy impact of the applications they create, and try to limit power consumption in order to not only extend battery life for your devices, but also decrease the overall power consumption of your computing.

I’m a bit skeptical about the impact that can be had here (most applications aren’t especially power-intensive and, at least in my mind, any significant power savings would need to happen either at the OS or hardware level), but I like the thought behind it all the same.

There are some areas where FOSS does make an environmental difference:

  • It allows users to keep older devices up and running for longer, either by allowing updates beyond when the original manufacturer intended to support the system, or by allowing you to use lower-power alternatives for the operating system to keep older systems in use longer.
  • Open source software is, generally speaking, more interoperable, so you don’t have to use a specific device from one manufacturer to communicate or work in conjunction with a device from a different manufacturer.
  • By combining efforts and working collaboratively, fewer resources are used by companies to create multiple tools that have the same/duplicate functionality.

That said, I don’t think that this is something that free software developers think about quite enough. Proprietary OSes and hardware, such as Apple’s iPadOS and macOS coupled with their devices running the newer M-series chips, are able to really take advantage of the hardware and manage the power to give an incredible amount of performance and an outstanding battery life. There can sometimes be advantages to that model. You can also tell how much the folks at Apple are thinking about energy use and power management; when you open the Activity Monitor, alongside the usual tables for memory usage and disk access, there’s a tab for energy used by each application. It’s not an afterthought, but rather a focus to keep users aware of the impact of the individual applications they are using, and to keep app developers as competitive and energy-minded as possible. I hope that, moving forward, we see more and more power management optimizations at the OS level, and more hardware like the M-series chips that can be very powerful at lower power consumption than other chips, but that are more open than the M1 so everyone can take advantage of them. The Ryzen 9 series from AMD has me especially hopeful, and the new Snapdragon processors could be good too, provided Qualcom follows through and manages to make good on their promises to add Linux compatibility.