Linux

This is generally not true. If you are using your laptop as a home server chances are it's going to be idling 99% of the time and laptops are generally pretty good in terms of idle power draw if you manage to disable the screen (or just disconnect it, take it off and find a way to repurpose it)

And in terms of environmental impact saving a laptop from landfill is definitely better since the majority of a computers impact is from the co2 emmissions from the manufacturing process. And this isn't taking into account the likely ethical considerations such as supporting terrible mining practices for resources like cobalt.

these shitty win8 laptops are surprisingly low power and efficient though.

Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power? A whole 60 watts? Are you rationing AA batteries to run your household?

What is it with the bullshit fanciful rationalizations people come up with to consume consume consume?

lowendtalk, hella cheap vps with plenty of resources for most self hosted apps, the issue with it is usually storage space but there are ways around that connecting your drives from elsewhere

Aren't laptops typically very energy efficient? Low consumption converts to high battery life, which is a priority for laptop hardware.

Some of them consume less than 10W.

Yes actually still sounds good. Raspberry Pis actually have quite high power draw compared to the performance they give. Like sure the number might be smallish but the performance they give and functionality they have is awful compared to even a mini PC which use similar power. Mini PCs btw are actually one of the best options in performance per watt and can still be cheap, plus they have upgradable RAM and storage. A Mac mini is more expensive but will thrash everything else in efficiency and performance per watt, although non-upgradable. Even slightly older laptops will only draw tens of watts when fully charged, vs a desktop or proper server that could pull 100W even at idle in some cases. Older laptops tended to be more upgradable too.

I'm not taking electronics advice from someone who uses the term lappies.

There's lots of ways to make existing hardware more efficient at the cost of performance. Under-volting the CPU and RAM (or just putting them in "efficiency" mode) can probably save more electricity than you lose in generational improvements. Considering how much more powerful PCs are compared to SBCs, you'd probably still have better performance than an SBC. Also, a more powerful CPU that takes double the power but as a result can idle for more than 50% of the time would be more efficient than a less powerful CPU never idling.

There's a lot of other variables (like idle power draw, efficiency at various power levels, idle latency, etc), but in general I think your statement would be inaccurate at least 60% of the time.