Thank you.
Can you hear me OK? Is it OK? Good. So I'm going to present about this new initiative,
and it's a continuation of the past initiative, the Bowing of a Foss.
I have a lot of resources in the slides. If you want to download them, there's a QR code.
You can also get it from the repository, and I'll come back to this at the end.
So we started this new initiative. And before I go into detail,
it's already been referenced several times in several of the talks that were
amazing yesterday from Nicole, Cornelius, and Joanna.
But before I get started, I usually like to ask the public a couple of questions.
And I'm not going to skip that today. So raise your hand if this applies to you.
How many of you have bought organic food or fair trade products in the past month?
Just raise your hand. Oh, wow. Great. Okay.
How many of you have decided to ride a bike or take public transportation when you could have driven?
Amazing. Great. How many of you have bought an electric vehicle or installed
solar panels in the past year or so? Amazing. Wow. A lot of people here.
So I want you to keep that in mind, okay, as I go through the talk.
I have one more question and just yell it out if you have an answer to it.
Why did you do these things?
All of them cost potentially more time, energy, and money in some cases.
Why did you do these things?
No backup plans, sorry. Why is it the right thing to do?
Because it's sustainable. That's one reason. It's sustainable.
What are some other reasons?
It's healthy. It's good for your own health. Perhaps also good for other people's
health and the world's health. Yeah, other reasons?
Because I can advocate for it if I don't do it myself.
You can't advocate for it if you don't do it yourself. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Yeah, you have to walk the walk if you talk the talk.
Yeah. Any other reasons?
There's no viable alternative in some cases, perhaps. Yeah.
There's no planet B, the sustainability reason. Yeah.
So I'm going to argue that many of those reasons that you do this,
that you overcome certain obstacles, maybe it costs more money,
maybe it takes more energy from you, maybe it takes more time,
is the same reason people should install Linux.
That's going to be the main argument of my talk today. And that's the sort of
main thrust for this project.
I'm going to do that in four parts. The first part, why do this,
which I'm titling, this is not fine.
Second part, what about the past project, the Blauwegen for Foss? How does it relate?
The third part is actually the new project, this opt-in, opt-out, opt-green.
And the final part is how to contribute. attribute. So many of you know the
this is fine dog sitting in a burning house, right?
Here's the continuation of that strip, if you just wait long enough, right?
Suddenly, the dog is also on fire. This is not fine. Oh, my God,
everything's on fire. What the hell is my problem? Okay.
Now, any of you have seen my talks. The topic of why we're doing this is familiar.
Anyone who reads the news knows why sustainability and the climate crisis is a crisis.
But just to go over that in brief.
So this is from April this year.
The Antarctic jumped to a staggering almost 40 degrees Celsius.
It's the coldest place on Earth.
Penguins, so I'm going to refer to penguins a few times in these slides,
both in terms of the endangered animal who are at high risk to evolve to accommodate
these changes, as well as penguins in the sense of Lenox.
Ocean temperatures are at the highest they've ever been recorded.
Um, this is just from three days ago, um, um, Copernicus, the EU agency measuring
climate change, um, has reported this as the hottest year ever.
Um, there are children who are born today or this, this year,
this is going to be the coldest summer they ever experienced.
It's really that hot and it's really our fault, right? This is from a, this is a Masson on toot.
You can't quite read the graph, but it's showing in various metrics that in
every possible way, the data is going up with one exception.
So the temperature, global temperature is going up. The sea levels are rising.
The time of year when the cherry blossoms bloom is earlier and earlier, etc.
The one exception is the sea ice, which is melting.
And this is from a climate scientist in the UK. He says, everywhere we look,
the climate is changing rapidly.
These changes are not natural, right? We are doing this. We are causing this change.
Oh my God, Jesus, what the, was I even thinking? There was no reason to let
it last this long and get this bad.
We've known about this for a long time. This is an article from a magazine called
Popular Mechanics from 1912.
This is already about 60 years after the first scientist, Eunice Newton Foote,
discovered that CO2 caused the temperature to rise when interacting with the
sun and took longer to cool down.
Her research was first presented by a man and only later published under her name.
In 1912, it was commented that adding CO2 tends to make the air a more effective
blanket for the Earth and to
raise its temperature. This effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
OK, we're one century later and it is considerable.
What does this have to do with us here? So this is a graph that I've used in
pretty much every talk I've given.
It's from the Association of Computing Machinery, where they look at the role
of ICT in climate change.
And they it's a really nice
report it's very short it gives a nice summary of the state
of things the comparison that
they make that the average of the co2 emissions from the ict sector is roughly
on a par with the aviation industry the main contributors to this are training
of large language models that was discussed a little bit earlier this morning
the number of internet connected devices, often for short-term use.
So they're not designed to last very long. It's another major contributor.
Blockchain technology is a major contributor.
And if nothing changes in the next 30 years, it will become a third of all CO2 emissions.
Now, not all of this is bad, some digital technology is replacing worse polluters.
But the emissions are rising so fast that this policy report comments that computing
can help mitigate climate change, but it must first cease contributing to it first.
And I'm going to go over that in a bit more detail. This is another meta-analysis
of some research scientists, Freitag et al.
From 2021, looking at the different models predicting CO2 emissions from the ICT sector.
What you notice here is, although some go up much more quickly,
some go up more gradually, they're all going up, right? We're increasing our CO2 footprint.
This is a report from the International Energy Agency looking at the energy
consumption worldwide.
Worldwide, and this is for the ICT sector, they find that it's about 8.5% of
the energy consumption comes from the ICT sector, and they break it down in
terms of different areas.
And you can see here that the manufacturing is about half of all of the energy
consumption driven by ICT.
This is another report. This is from Apple's own environmental report,
where they look at their CO2 emissions of the entire company.
And they report that production is about 75% of their CO2 emissions.
This is a nice graph from a Swiss university comparing different devices in
terms of their usage and production costs.
And you see here that desktop and laptop computers have overall higher CO2 emissions
associated with them compared to tablets, smartphones, and printers.
Tablets are incredibly efficient, surprisingly.
But you see in all of them that production, the orange part of the bar plot,
is the most of the CO2 emissions associated with these devices.
So, related to this, the International Council of Academies of Engineering and
Technological Sciences,
which is a large group of different engineering groups, research groups,
said that we need to introduce judicious policies for the replacement of ICT
equipment due to the high energy consumption for manufacturing of ICT,
which represents half of the total, and the high environmental impact of ICT decommissioning.
Which is then in this slide and this is the topic that Joanna presented yesterday about e-waste.
You can see here a end-of-life treatment center in Ghana where our products
when they end up in a end-of-life treatment center many of them don't.
They are then broken apart and precious metals are taken out of them.
Here you see a picture of the cables being burnt to get the metals out from
inside them. In the best case scenario, this pollutes the air,
the water, the soil, and harms the health of the people working there.
Worst case scenario, people are scavenging for toxic metals,
which cause serious bodily harm.
And the production of devices requires rare earth minerals that often come from
places like the Congo, where people live in miserable conditions.
And there are human rights violations with child labor to get the cobalt out
of the earth to make our batteries.
In 2015, about 10 years ago, Achim Steiner from the UN Environmental Program
commented there's a tsunami of e-waste.
At that point, there was about 45 million tons of e-waste produced.
If you were to make Eiffel Towers out of that, that would be the equivalent of 4,500 Eiffel Towers.
If you stack those Eiffel Towers, it'd be 17 times higher than Mount Everest,
right? It's a lot of e-waste.
It's only increased since then. In 2022, it was about 15 million tons more, and it's not going down.
Only about 20% of e-waste actually gets recycled.
And although it's only 2% of the e-waste in landfills, it contributes about 70% of the toxic waste.
So before I go to the next slide, just to sum up, manufacturing has a huge cost.
E-waste has a huge cost. Okay, keep those two things in mind.
So what about the Blaue Engel for FOSS? So many of you may not know about the
Blaue Engel for FOSS project.
It was the previous government-funded project from the Umwelbundesamt,
the German environment agency, related to the Blue Angel eco-label.
The Blue Angel eco-label, the first version was published in 2020.
The newest version was updated in 2024.
Initially, it was just for desktop software. It's now been revised to include
mobile apps and a server software.
And it has three main categories, resource and energy efficiency,
potential hardware operating life, and user autonomy.
And the project Blau-Engel for FOSS recognized, so this is a more detailed list
of those three main categories, recognized that the transparency.
And the user autonomy criteria were very compatible with what free and open
source software is already doing. Okay.
Of course, there are ways that we can improve, but we're already meeting many of these criteria.
And one of the ways that the criteria, one of the things that recognizes is
that there's environmental harm when you have vendor dependency,
when you have vendor dependency for control over the software that you depend
on, when you have software that
is increasingly adding new features and becoming more and more bloated,
that you have hardware obsolescence, planned obsolescence in the software,
which results in requiring new and more powerful devices.
That's one of the reasons why the requirements for the resource and energy efficiency
say that if you want to be eco-certified, it can't increase by more than 10%
in the energy consumption of that software while it's eco-certified.
It's to prevent this need for ever more powerful devices,
because those more and more powerful devices mean that older devices that aren't
as powerful get discarded as e-waste, or maybe the software support is no longer
there, it gets discarded as e-waste, and new devices are produced and shipped unnecessarily.
So I'm going to focus on a couple of aspects of that. So one is about the user
autonomy of deciding how your
software works, as well as the freedom for advertisement and tracking.
This is in Windows 11 now, you're going to have advertisements,
whether you want wanted or not in the start menu, that is something you can't
turn off and it consumes energy.
So these changes result over time in having a situation like this.
This is a report from the Umweltbundesamt, the German Environment Agency,
comparing different word processors when doing the exact same thing.
They don't identify which word processors were tested. You can probably guess.
On the right is a proprietary word processor. On the left, it's a open source
word processor. And again, to do the exact same thing, the proprietary wanted
to consume four times the energy.
To do the exact same thing.
Again, going back to tracking and advertisements, this is a report about the
energy consumption driven by unnecessary or unwanted data use.
It was only for the EU and they estimated that about 60% of people would like
to turn off ads and tracking if they could,
but they can't, resulting in energy consumption in a year of about the city of Lisbon or Turin.
Just by having that turned off would save that much energy. And this is for
something that people don't want.
So user autonomy, having control of your software, this can result in major
energy savings once you scale it up, and results in devices being able to be used for longer.
Hardware, so continuity of support is another criteria of the Blue Angel.
Software support can greatly influence how long we can use devices.
This is an estimate of how much e-waste will be produced by Windows 11 dropping
support for devices that currently want run Windows 10. It's about 250 million computers.
And Intel chips in Mac devices and Apple devices is slowly being phased out.
I think the first ones have been phased out for the newest Mac OS update.
And some of these devices are from 2019, 2020.
Some of the devices here are probably similarly about that old.
They're not that old. These are very powerful devices.
The loss of that support means that in Apple's case, they'll get two years of
security updates. and then the hardware becomes e-waste unless you do something
about the software running on it.
So these are like in the Blau Engel for FOSS,
one of the things that we were focusing on is taking the criteria of the Blue
Angel to free and open source software communities, to developer communities,
and trying to promote the eco-certification of free and open-source software,
since we're already meeting many of these criteria, and perhaps we can influence
things like green public procurement,
get more free software into public offices,
and to promote it amongst consumers who might be interested in these kinds of things.
But consumers seem to be aware of the problem, but maybe not aware of the solution.
So this is a Eurobarometer poll from, I think, 2022,
if I remember correctly, in which reasons for purchasing a new device were given
that 30% said the performance of their old device had significantly deteriorated,
and about 20% said certain applications or software stopped working on their old device.
So, they're recognizing the problem and interest in sustainable products is increasing.
This is an Economist report and from the WWF about the interest,
the searches for sustainable software or sustainable products has gone up globally
and across many different countries.
And this is largely driven by environmental activists.
And one of the things that I was asking is how many people, how many end users
actually know that there is something like the Blue Angel, that there is this
idea of sustainable software and eco-certification for software,
that it actually means something, and that they can do something about this.
That they don't have to discard their devices because it's getting too slow
and the software isn't working if they know that there's other software they
can run on their devices.
So, to sum up the two past sections, which really motivated the writing of this
proposal, manufacturing is a huge environmental, has huge environmental costs.
Users seem to be aware of problems, but maybe not solutions.
And when I was sitting there writing the proposal, and thank you to the KDEV
for supporting me in this process, thank you to Nate's mom, who actually gave
really great content feedback on one of the early drafts of the proposal.
Decided on writing a proposal which we're calling OptGreen Sustainable Software
for Sustainable Hardware.
And the idea is to take what we're doing in KDEco, to take what the Blue Angel
is doing in their criteria for certifying software as sustainable,
and take it directly to end users, and in particular, those end users that we're
calling eco-consumers.
So all those people who are willing to take a little bit extra time,
a little bit extra energy, maybe spend a little more money, as many people here
are willing to do for other products,
and align that with their digital products, to raise the issue that you might go and buy, you know.
I'm trying to think of the word, organic food at a market. I bought this on
the way here, actually. There's a little market down the street.
And not think that the phone that you throw away is also something you should be considering, right?
And once you can bring those two things together, we might see that people are
more and more interested in installing free software in order to keep their
devices in use for longer.
Because we're focusing on this particular target audience, we're interested in design.
So this is something that when writing the proposal, I thought,
OK, how are we going to address these people?
And my sense is sitting in Europe, in Western Europe, with a North American
background, that design really plays an important role.
Now, someone brought up a question yesterday, what are we doing to address global communities?
Now, this design approach may be different in different communities.
If you are interested in the topic and you want to get involved,
you're more than welcome to give us feedback, give ideas so that we can tailor
our design for the communities that you want to address.
But we have, this is a brand brief that our designer made, giving some guidelines
for the kind of visual imagery that we want to use in this project.
So that we can attract eco-consumers to free software using a visual language
that might be familiar or attractive to that particular audience.
We're revamping the website. Okay, I have plenty of time. We're revamping the website. site.
Again, we have an existing website from the previous project,
the Blaue Engelhoff FOS.
We're now reshaping it for this new project and trying to incorporate past initiatives into it.
We have three main areas. Be green. This is for end users.
Grow green. These are for advocates who want to promote free software in terms of sustainability.
And make green, which is for developers. And that's a continuation of much of
the work we are doing in the past project, which I'll come to in just a second.
We have campaigns and advertisements. I have some pamphlets here.
Here's a digital version of it, which we want to distribute at various events.
We have a budget for ads. We want to actually take out ads in magazines and
print media to promote this in communities communities that may not be as active
on social media or may be active in social media and in these other places.
So we want to try to attract people who might be outside of our normal tech bubbles.
If you have ideas for advertisements, please be in touch.
We'd love your feedback. We're going to eco festivals, open air markets, organic shops.
We want to take what we're doing in KDE, KDEco,
what the free software world is doing, and take it directly to people that we're
defining as eco-consumers, people who might be interested in sustainability
aspects in other areas of life and trying to bring them into this digital sustainability world.
This is actually a picture from April in Berlin. It's an eco-festival with,
I think, 20,000 attendees.
This is from the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft, the Long Night of Sciences.
We had a table at the Umweltbundesamt with the German Environment Agency,
together with various other projects from the Umweltbundesamt.
This is, you know, various devices running KDE and free software.
We have some nice conkeys here from Albert's mom, a canoe over here, some pamphlets.
This is a computer. have it here. It's from 2003.
It was updated two days ago. It's running up to date G Compre on it.
Now, I don't use this. I don't bring this necessarily to say,
hey, you should use this computer.
But the point that I'm trying to make when bringing this there is that there's
no other operating system you could run on this if it's not free software. There's nothing.
The only option you have is free software. And in fact, this was running Haiku.
Haiku actually ports a lot of KDE software, which is nice. So I was able to
have some games running on it with Gcompre.
It was a great tool to get people interested. Kids would see it and immediately
come to it and start playing, and then I could talk to the parents about digital
sustainability and walk them through the pamphlet and how free software addresses
many of the issues about hardware obsolescence.
One of the things we're doing is demoing, and I put in here parentheses unsupported
hardware running free software.
Now the unsupported part, this e-waste part, is both important in terms of what
is already e-waste, that's the unsupported, or what would be e-waste,
that's the unsupported part.
So people have devices, perhaps at home, that they just have lying there in
their closet or in their drawer. They don't know what to do with it.
I've actually learned since starting this project that many people save those
devices because they have data on it, which I found really interesting.
It's very different than how I think of these things, but they think of as archives
of their data, which is an obstacle for when trying to put new software on it.
So one of the hooks we have is you can take your old device and give it a new life.
In fact, we're using this bring
it back to life as a sort of a catch to bring people to these events.
And one of the reasons is because free software excels in this area.
You know, we've been doing, Oh, I have to go quickly. We've been doing this
for so long. It's a blue ocean.
No one else is in this space, but it's not only about unsupported hardware.
New hardware that's running Linux means you can run that hardware to the end
of the hardware operating life, right?
It's not just about old devices. Also new devices that are running Linux will run for longer.
I'm just going to take another two or three minutes, and then I have 15. Okay.
One of the things we want to do is visibility. Cornelius brought this up in his presentation.
This is a screenshot from the K-Eco Lab. This is the remote access that was
mentioned yesterday in the Sustainable Software Goal.
We can now run from GitLab a usage scenario script to get energy consumption
reports back for developers, also for end users,
by pointing out the transparency that we're doing in KDE in terms of our energy consumption.
The documentation we're putting in the website, this is from Ocular's EcoTab.
If you're interested in the topic of measurement, we're going to have a BOF
on Monday, tomorrow at three.
Please come by. There's a lot to do here. There's a lot of interesting things we can do.
And I'll come back to that in a second. we're running workshops so when
we do these events where we're presenting pamphlets and stuff we're trying
to have a a workshop coming right
afterwards um so this is uh
one so we've already had four workshops um
this is going to be a monthly workshop that we're doing at a culture yoga
center in berlin i'm trying to do outreach
to people we think might be interested in the topic
of sustainability but haven't thought about in the digital space um this
is currently in planning will probably start in october with once
a month people know they can go there on a friday evening at eight o'clock there's
a community kitchen serving food it's very popular there's usually about 30
40 people from the neighborhood who come by and we can offer support this is
one initiative of many in berlin i've since learned that berlin actually has a really strong repair,
cafe culture that is actually doing this kind of stuff already and we're trying
to network them in order to build a network within Berlin.
We would love to take this outside of just one place and do it in many places.
So if you're interested in this topic, you want to get involved,
please be in touch. We would like to expand this so it's not just a couple of
people in Berlin, but it's potentially global.
And as Nicole pointed out, Nicole has done some amazing work doing outreach to schools,
events in Hanover, the first, hopefully first of many, where we're teaching
children how to revive what would be e-waste devices in use.
And this is good for the environment. It's good for actual penguins.
It's also good for Linux, right?
There are many reasons. This is really one of those areas where I think we can
really have an impact. I think the sustainability issues around manufacturing are, as we saw, huge.
And I actually think it's one of those areas, I was thinking about it,
where, what's the term, when, I'm blanking on the term, backfire.
When you have a certain amount of efficiency gains, often that means you then
use things more that you end up consuming more because of those efficiency gains.
But I actually think device longevity is not one of those areas.
If you keep a device in use, you're not going to buy a new device.
Most people aren't. Most people are just happy to keep using that device.
So it's not an area where I think that it means people will consume then two
or three times more devices potentially, but they'll keep using a device.
And if we can keep devices in use, so all of those estimates are based on an
assumption of five years of operating life.
If we can keep devices in use for eight years, ten years, that's a huge savings
when you scale it up to users in terms of energy and CO2 emissions.
OK, how can you contribute? We have a BOF. There are many topics to discuss.
I have three in particular, but I'll just mention. So design,
documentation. This is the EcoTab.
Things like minimal system requirements.
Discussions about that. Organizing workshops, campaigns or having this idea
of an oldest hardware competition. who can run KDE Plasma on the oldest piece of hardware.
I don't know what the prize is yet, but I have to think about it.
Marketing, we're thinking about measuring different software products and doing
some marketing out of that to show energy consumption and different products for that.
Translation would be really helpful. We would like to take this to many places,
these kinds of pamphlets, organized events.
We need translators. Two things I would like to point out in particular,
This EcoTab is an idea that we've been discussing for a while.
Actually, a lot of work has already been done on it.
It just needs a couple of extra steps to make it across the finish line.
We're almost there. We have so much that if someone wants to help out with this, it would be great.
We can get this into KDE software where we can include information about the
sustainability aspects of free software, including things like Blue Angel certification
and energy consumption reports.
Um and design if you're interested in design we have an amazing designer
anita who's doing great work but we would like to get more people
in the community involved to make really beautiful katie's already doing
such amazing work making the software beautiful i would
love some help making some of our materials beautiful in this particular project
and then we have a measurement buff and a couple of things we want to talk about
there is this k eco lab this energy consumption measurement lab katie eco test
which i'll talk about in just a second as well as ideas like the EcoCI tool
from Green Coding Solutions.
They've actually been very helpful with setting up our lab. Arna came to many
of our sprints, helped us set up our lab.
They're designing their own tooling for measuring software.
They're also designing tooling to measure the embodied carbon of software development
to get an idea of how much CO2 emissions are associated with the development of software itself.
And this is a tool that's actually been, Arna made a merge request.
There's some discussion about how KDE can integrate it.
I'd be interested to know if developers would actually be interested in this.
Come to the BOF, discuss it with me in the breaks. I would love your feedback.
And usage scenario scripting, this came up in the goals discussion yesterday.
Selenium is a great tool for many things, also for energy consumption measurements,
but also KDEcoTest, which doesn't require access to the source code, is another such tool.
So this is KDEcoLab. I'm just going to skip over this and the measurement BOF.
This is This is KDEcoTest, it's an emulation tool designed with help from Emmanuel from Gcompre,
who has worked on trying to make the emulation tooling easier to use so that
it's more accessible to people to make scripts so that we can emulate user behavior
to get energy consumption reports.
And I just have a couple of open thoughts. I didn't know where to put these in the slides.
And there are two in particular that I think are, I'm very interested in.
How low is too low for minimum hardware requirements
right plasma is not going to run on this like kd software does it's ported haiku
is the operating system um haiku is one of the places where the 90s are still
alive um it's uh incredible actually how much they can do um do we want to do that,
And I'm guessing, no, I mean, this is old hardware, right?
But maybe we do, or maybe we want to think about it. Maybe we want to think
about consciously, where do we want to make the cutoff?
Where do we want to say as a community, no, we think lower than this is just
not worth our energy because we're a limited resource here.
But maybe we want to go further back, or maybe it's not that hard to do,
or maybe things like PinePhone is going to require us to go back.
So maybe this is something I want to think about. How low is too low?
What about design decisions like having UEFI as a requirement, right?
What is that going to exclude? That's fine. It's a totally valid decision to
make, but it's going to exclude a lot of hardware.
Is that what we want to do for what we're doing here, or do we want to do something
else? I think these are questions we should ask.
Download for updates. If we have three gigabyte downloads, I know that's not
an issue long term, but right now it is with this immutable OS,
that's going to exclude a lot of populations where they don't have good internet, right?
Is this the kind of thing we want to do or do we want to support those communities in what we're doing?
Of course, Plasma can be included in other distros that are focusing on these things.
But what do we want to do as a community? What do we want to focus on?
And another thing is improving performance on lower spec hardware.
This came up in the chat room, idea of documenting
what improves responsiveness and resource usage things
that you can turn on and off maybe baloo can be turned off on lower spec hardware
to increase uh the to give uh more resources for other things um is there a
way we can have an automated system to identify some of these things and even
better can we have an automated system that then matches these you know,
improvements to the responsiveness with just a click of a button um can we do
we want to do something like that.
This would allow us to then keep supporting older hardware that has lower spec
and give us features that are, you know, for the newest hardware if we want
that, if we want to offer that, right? So these are some of the questions I
just had some open thoughts about.
I'm going to leave it at that and then we can do a few questions.
Okay, so as a Plasma developer, I would love to have such a dashboard,
at least to have a tap on do we improve things or do we regress things.
I have a question about hardware, because software, yeah,
it's one part of the puzzle, but we still
have problem with hardware for example i've got
laptop and because of my butterfingers i dropped it and i have now cracking
my display i want to replace it but there is no way how i can do it and so basically
my question is does the eu have some,
legislature for things such as right to repair or other plans or other um,
some motions to passage law so basically like like in the us there's louis rossmann,
who's advocating for right to repair and i was wondering if the eu also has something like this,
Because, yeah, software is, it's one part of the puzzle, but hardware is much
a bigger problem and I believe that it still needs to be somehow tackled.
So the project is focused mostly on the software aspect, sustainable software
for sustainable hardware.
Actual right to repair legislation, I know there is some, I don't know the details
of it. I bet you someone here does.
There is this during the due to this legislation for right to repair there is this,
repairability index for hardware especially in
the context of France so if you buy and purchase new
equipment you can make like
an informal decision and see for how long
your hardware world will be supported in a way that you
will have an access to um repairing manuals to
spare parts and also for
the guarantee so this movement
and this like awareness is growing especially in europe but also what uh what
kde eco is doing here rising awareness among like the end users in terms of
like making more sustainable and aware choices,
I think it's also extremely important.
Legislation is one thing, but also from the bottom is extremely important to
educate the end customers.
Laptop is um easily repairable and
like most people just look at the laptop price
and and buy it like they won't even think
about hey do i need to to repair it etc so um
maybe maybe just one thing i think we have to wrap up
in a second maybe just one thing a final comment there are various um uh hardware
producers um slimbook uh framework uh frameworks fairphone etc that are trying
to at least think of some of these things in terms of not having the hardware
have batteries glued on.
I know Slimbook, I was talking with them the other day, and they have a lot
of parts that they can repair.
If you have a broken component, they can repair many of these things.
Frameworks has this whole modular idea. Fairphone has a modular approach.
So I think there are things that are related that actually KDE is in touch with.
And we can actually bring up some of of those things when we're reaching out
to people of the hardware providers that we know are doing things better but
there is a whole world out there that's um another uh i have a question about the.
What territory all this is applying to because you said you had uh for example,
um a budget for advertising and for that i'm guessing this is only for germany,
because it's no you so you could actually publish an advertisement in a Spanish
newspaper for example or if there was a budget for it yep,
as far as I know there's no,
I don't remember what it was but,
there's no restriction on where we spend that money for the advertisements as
long as it's related to the project we have to justify why we're spending it there,
And I would love to do something. I mean, I keep thinking about Firefox.
We're there in New York Times, Two Page.
You know, we could do something with that. Maybe not that, but we can do something
that's high impact. We have a budget.
So if there's an event in another country and we want to do flyers or stuff
like that? We have a budget for it. Yeah.
Related to this project. That's for the funding. For the funding. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So basically related to the comment before.
So in my opinion, even before repairing broken stuff, there's the issue that
the electronic devices, at least for me, everything still works,
but the batteries are worn down.
And I don't get new batteries anymore. So because of the batteries worn down,
I need a new device. That sucks.
Yes, that's a huge issue. And that's why it's important not to glue them on.
And it's important to have devices that can replace batteries. I mean, yeah.
Yeah. So the comment for the people online is that also the way the software,
the demands of the software on the hardware will also wear down the battery more quickly.
That's another argument for efficiency and in software development.