KDE Hiring For New Project To Promote Environmentally-Sustainable Software

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Hiring For New Project To Promote Environmentally-Sustainable Software

KDE e.V. as the German legal organization behind the KDE project is hiring an employee for a new project to promote environmentally-sustainable software and long-term hardware use...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Environmentally-Sustainable

[Panix]

"+environmentally-sustainable software" - what a joke. Anything to do with Germany needs to be avoided.

[skeevy420]

That's something I've always thought was a good idea and have been passionate about, only I'm not sure how to actually do it outside of doing things like vigilant testing of different power settings, providing targeted binaries for every V level (x86_64_v#) or for popular architectures present and past, passionate lectures at events and conferences to spread the efficiency gospel, perhaps even making a KDE-centric distribution based on Gentoo to slim down binaries even further, communicate with AMD, Intel, and other Linux leaders to learn how they'd like their software and hardware to be configured for optimal usage or to even try to persuade them on how they should manufacture their hardware to be more sustainable (like how AMD has long-term sockets).

Really cool that KDE is going to have a position just to promote sustainability and to push for things like that in the open source desktop world.

This entire concept is related to what I was saying the other day about how you really have to nitpick to find stuff wrong with KDE. Efficiency and sustainability can be extremely nitpicky things that requires a lot of boring work. Where is the code slowing up at? Can it be compiled better? Is there a better format to do X or Y? A lot of analysis and testing.

Can any of y'all suggest a full suite of testing software they might be able to use to help them with all of that?

Panix I know this is going to sound really woke and dumb, I really do, but millions people running poorly optimized software use a lot of unnecessary electricity which creates a lot of unnecessary pollution. Now, there are currently 8.1 Billion people in the world. That means billions of people running poorly optimized software. You might go "but it's just Linux or KDE", but just Linux and KDE powers handheld gaming devices for nearly 2 million people. Expand that out to all the smart cars, tinker boards, PCs, POS systems, servers, and more that can run Linux, and KDE being able to say "we'll save you 20% more battery life over GNOME, Mate, or LXQT" could be the very thing that gets them picked over all the rest of the Linux UI competition.

[hedonist]

i love the kde project and im glad they are able to expand plasma and the rest of their software, i only hope they are able to keep improving! good job kde devs!

and massive W on kde plasma's part for pushing for environmental sustainability in the open source world, their commitment to being green is great!

[Fanboy80]

"+environmentally-sustainable software" - what a joke. Anything to do with Germany needs to be avoided.

Yep, probably one of those lunatics that glues himself on the street is going to take that position.

[QwertyChouskie]

"Environmentally-Sustainable Software" could mean anything really. That said, we are talking the KDE project, not some known greenwasher like Apple or such, so I'm hoping we actually get some cool software/projects out of this.

[Type44Q]

...what a joke.

I think the situation can be summed-up thusly:

"Those who can code, do."

[daemonburrito]

Well, I guess it's my turn to take a hit. I won't apologize for being "too woke", we all should be so aware of the biosphere and our tenuous place in it. It's a great idea, and a fine gesture.

(Btw, in case anyone does care about their cringe, above comments need to learn about "woke". I'm good with being called "woke", but KDE's job listing doesn't really apply. Just doing my part to counterbalance engineer-syndrome perceptions.)

[NotMine999]

Just imagine...

Coding by the light of a warm fireplace while pedalling your bike to charge the batteries that run your phone and computer.

Charging your EV is optional.

[sergk]

I wonder if "Environmentally-Sustainable Software" has specific definition that is not self-referencing. Also genuinely curious what are examples of Environmentally-Unsustainable Software.