Green Ubuntu server

I have a tiny 3W Intel Atom-based Ubuntu server, and I hadn't upgraded it for many years. Well, now I wanted Arduino support and thought it would be a good time to deal with the hassle of upgrading 7 major versions. Something went haywire and I had to reinstall. I'm still using an old SATA disk, so in order to save some watts and add some life expectancy to the hardware (which normally isn't used more than once a week on average), I want the disk to spin down.

To find the culprits spinning up my disk I ran:

ls -talc

in the root (/) folder and some other places. Then I added the entries I found to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/log                                            tmpfs   defaults        0       0
tmpfs /var/lib/dhcp                                       tmpfs   defaults        0       0
tmpfs /var/lib/sudo                                       tmpfs   mode=700        0       0
tmpfs /var/lib/update-notifier                            tmpfs   defaults        0       0

And also added ",noatime" to my HDD partitions (not swap however). Then I added

hdparm -B -S 243 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXX_YYYYYY

to my /etc/rc.local. Apart from that I installed a couple of packages I wanted and set an hourly cron job running dynamic DNS so I can connect from anywhere. DuckDNS is free and simple to use:

curl -k "https://www.duckdns.org/update?domains=pixeldoctrine&token=xxxxxx-yyyyyy-zzzzzz&ip="

Right, I also started the rsync service because I wanted a better way to backup my pictures. That's all I had to do to get the server exactly as I wanted it. If somebody could make a nice GUI to go with the desktop installations, I'm betting Linux will take over in a few years. Oh, and here's my powertop output:

Summary: 4.4 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 0.3% CPU use

In the last 7 major version steps they've managed to more than half the wakeups on my machine when idling. I'm pretty sure Microsoft is not up to the challenge any time soon. "Which solution is best" is slowly overpowering "how much money is in this new solution" in some of areas where there is a BDFL. Linux desktop GUI needs an outstanding BDFL; with that I'd be hooked.