Tux Machines

Programming: What is Sustainable Software, Mistakes, and Debugging Primer

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 12, 2023

What is Sustainable Software, After All?

One of KDE's current strategic goals is the "Sustainable Software" goal. There is a bunch of activities around that, but sometimes people still ask, "What does 'Sustainable Software' actually mean?" Let's try to break it down.

In general, sustainability means living and acting in a way that endures over time, without depleting resources or harming the environment and its inhabitants.

What does that mean in the context of software?

First of all, software indirectly consumes natural resources. It requires hardware to be built on which the software can run, and running software consumes energy. The way software is written has a significant influence on resource consumption.

An extreme example is Bitcoin, where the algorithm to secure the network requires an enormous use of computing resources and related energy consumption. Another example is software-induced hardware obsolescence, where hardware vendors drive sales of new hardware through software updates incompatible with older hardware, resulting in electronic waste and consumption of resources and energy in producing new hardware.

AI Creators Are Still Making The Same Mistake This Programmer Made 25 Years Ago

Oh dear.

Mike Blumenkrantz: Debugging Primer

If nothing goes wrong, Mesa 23.1 will ship in the next few hours, which means that at last everyone will have a new zink release.

And it’s a big one.

Since I’m expecting lots of people will be testing zink for the first time now that it should be usable for most things, I thought it would be useful to have a post about debugging zink. Or maybe not debugging but issue reporting. Yeah that sounds right.

Zink is a complex driver. It has many components: [...]