Every watt is sacred.

Every watt is great.

If a watt is wasted,

The EU gets irate.

;-P

I am sure someone with more time on their hands could come up with a very catchy pro-efficiency jingle along those lines - I'm sure the Pythons would conscent.

When the next linux distro comes out, and it can run on LESS resources than the last one, THEN we'll be getting somewhere.

As long as software developers keep coming out with crappy unpolished bloatware like MSWindows and the average Linux distro, just to name a couple, then we're not going to get anywhere. We'll just be buying more and more, and throwing out still working hardware. The whole business model is based on the fundemental act of dumping.

Ignoring the fact that average desktop-oriented GNU/Linux distributions are only marginally related to the issue in hand (they make a great topic for a flame, though!), it might be worth pointing out that most Distros come with a choice of software, of which some is particularly suited to running on lower hardware requirements (think KDE-->Xfce, for example).