My NAS/home server takes about 180 kWH/year, or 20W on average (costs me about 5 Euro/month). This feels like a lot to me and makes up a good chunk of my total energy usage.
What I did to optimize it is mostly select a “low-power” x86 platform, and limit the number of disks. I also decided not to use TrueNAS because it couldn’t let the disks from going to sleep.
The machine hosts 10 TB of usable storage (+RAID 1), syncthing, immich, file server, Influx DB, Grafana, and a few other services.
The kernel has supported it for a few years now and it’s a supported architecture for Debian.
For me, the main thing holding me back from getting a RISC-V SBC/computer is the lack of high performance processors. But they seem to be making progress there too.
They also looked at Gnome and raw DRM. As mentioned in the talk, there’s no significant difference between Gnome and KDE. Without VRR, they each loose one frame compared to the raw DRM. With VRR all three are on par.
The Gnome results are available in the repo: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/klysik_nv/xdc_2026_latency/-/blob/main/Charts/heatmap_path_comparison.png?ref_type=heads
I didn’t move that far away (to Debian + ZFS), so that limitation still remains. Although the addition of Raid-Z expansion should alleviate things quite a bit.