First Ever Eco-Certified Computer Program: KDE's Popular PDF Reader Okular

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

or the NewPipe App...

[1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite

You lost me there. Most "e-waste" is, IMHO, produced by inefficient software that is occupying a whole server farm where an efficient implementation will run on your router and still have enough resources to spare to brew a coffee. See thepiratebay, they disabled, IIRC, more than half of their servers when they switched to open tracker.

> "In 2020 the German Environment Agency extended the award criteria to include software products, which was the first in the world of environmental certifications to link transparency and user autonomy with sustainability. In order to obtain the ecolabel, a software product must demonstrate that it meets a list of stringent requirements considered critical for the environment over the product’s life cycle. These include providing transparency in the energy consumption when using the software – for example, in the case of Okular, while reading or annotating a PDF – and the ability to run the application on hardware at least five years old. The Blue Angel award criteria also include a list of user autonomy requirements which reduce the environmental impact of software."

Okular is great and I'm a big fan of Free software generally, but the extension of this environmentalism award to encompass Free software values seems like a well-intentioned stretch and that 'runs on 5 year old hardware' thing is a joke. I'm hard pressed to think of any software that can't run on a computer from 2017. They might as well give the certification to the rest of all the Linux desktop software too. That won't happen I'm sure; Okular got it because KDE has organized an effort to get such certifications (https://eco.kde.org/#be4foss). Free software authors/groups that don't have the time/energy to seek the certification doubtlessly won't receive it.

So Okular has this certification and Envice does not. Does this actually tell you anything about which of the two is more ecological? I don't think so, it isn't safe to assume just from this certification that Okular is more efficient than Envice. But if an ecological certification isn't useful for such product comparisons, then what exactly is it for?