I remember, that was a dramatic change.

Also, most people now dont remember this, but YouTube was initially popular because their flash video player was efficient, worked acrossed many different system configurations and browsers and dynamically changed resolution to match your connection.

At that point you had some people with broadband connections and a lot more with dial-up. So often dial-up users would not be able to watch videos because they were only available in one resolution.

YT had 144p (or less!) videos ready for dial-up users and higher resolution videos for broadband users and it automatically picked the appropriate video for the client. This made it so most people (dial-up users) would look to YT first, because you knew that YT would have a video that you could actually watch.

Then Google bought them.

Oh man, I was like a kid in a candy shop when I got my hands on Flash 4... built quite a few sites with it.

it was always wild to me back in the day when so many container images were based on ubuntu… was like PLEASE debian is functionally identical here at like 1/10th the base container size!

Mostly yes but there are functional differences in convenience. For example the standard upgrade process is completely manual. You have to disable third party repos. You have to change the repos. You have to check if you have space. You have to remove obsolete oackages. And more. On Ubuntu, the software update tool does all that, eliminating a lot of possibility for error. To an exoerienced user, the Debian process is fine. A novice would have plenty of opportunity for frustration and pain.

I prefer "ubuntu without the bullshit"

It has much slower release cycle and ancient kernel. For people with new hardware it's not suitable.

It's a Framework with 11th gen Intel i5. I've never seen it below 11W while doing this. I don't recall the exact number I got in Debian 12 but I think it was in the 11-13W range. The numbers were similar with Ubuntu LTS which I used till about a year ago. Now I see 9-10W. The screen is 3:2 13". Not sure about the enconding but I have GPU decoding working in Firefox.

It's a youtube video so whatever youtube is these days. I tested with this M1 Macbook Pro and it was using about 7 watts so 3 watts more is pretty good for pretty much anything. I think my 12th Gen. laptop typically draws about 13-15 doing the same thing, but with a much dimmer screen.

You can use the Wattz app to monitor current/power flowing into/out of the battery on some Android phones. Yes, 3 W is about the average in normal use. Unfortunately you cannot gauge the power consumption while charging unless you have a USB wattmeter too: the system only measures battery current because it's required for battery capacity/percentages.

There's a browser extension called "Your Codecs." which can prevent YouTube from serving you AV1-encoded videos.

I wish there were more M.2 cards beyond just SSDs and wireless NICs. The idea of a small form factor PICe interface is underutilized and things like hardware codec accelerators can keep laptops with older processors usable with new standards for longer. It's sad how PCMCIA had an entire ecosystem of expansion cards yet we somehow decided that the much higher bandwidth M.2 is only for storage and networking. Hell, do what sound cards in the 90s/00s did and have M.2 SSDs specifically designed for upgrading older laptops that also have built in accelerators for the latest media standards. Hardware acceleration is energy efficient and can probably just be bundled into the flash controller like they're bundled into the processor, and unless you have a top of the line SSD you're probably not saturating the M.2 interface anyway.

Powertop