All that 'yak shaving' makes me feel like Windows and OS X are poised to become legacy desktop operating systems. Every other popular consumer operating system today avoids that stuff somewhat successfully and none of us wish devops would disappear so we can manually do that stuff again. Security around traditional desktop operating systems is getting unfunny very fast too.
Some of the software we like is so wasteful too. I think we have a duty at this point to not be environmentally callous when we write software - manual updates are a good example, a minute wasted here and there might go unnoticed but something like Alfred nominated elsewhere in this submission probably adds up to millions of minutes of computers on and the operators devoted to watching a few megabytes download for a minute or two every time they update, probably actual tons of coal frivolously consumed.
I nominate Chrome OS. It has a lot of warts but it removes all of that stuff and dev mode = Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS. Once the Play Store is integrated Android apps will fill in some more of the functionality holes.
I bark to people all the time about how environmentally unconscious it is to do something on a million client machines which could have been done once on the server and cached. Namely client side JavaScript based document composition. If everyone is going to do the exact same thing, it's just a huge waste of cycles.
Being environmentally unconscious does not increase the average tech company's bottom-line. But reducing load on their servers does. So from that angle it makes sense. Interesting perspective though - I've never considered servers deferring compute tasks to clients to be undesirable. When I first came across the idea it seemed pretty revolutionary and sensible to me (maybe JS hype contributed to my viewpoint).
I'm going to agree, but sometimes it's a tough question what action is more environmentally conscious. While you could cache some value on a server to reduce the energy consumption of compute, requests to the server for the cached data will drive up the energy consumption of the network.
Some of the software we like is so wasteful too. I think we have a duty at this point to not be environmentally callous when we write software - manual updates are a good example, a minute wasted here and there might go unnoticed but something like Alfred nominated elsewhere in this submission probably adds up to millions of minutes of computers on and the operators devoted to watching a few megabytes download for a minute or two every time they update, probably actual tons of coal frivolously consumed.
I nominate Chrome OS. It has a lot of warts but it removes all of that stuff and dev mode = Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS. Once the Play Store is integrated Android apps will fill in some more of the functionality holes.