I will need to get a laptop in the foreseeable future, and I really want to stick to Linux. However, I may need to be out-of-home for 12+ hours straight in a day. After some research, it seems people are generally not that impressed with battery life on Linux?
The laptop does not need to do anything heavy duty, as I will remote back into my already very beefy desktop back home.
I guess a common solution to this light use case is M2 MacBook if one wants to completely throw battery concern out of the window. Well… let’s just say it’s a love-hate relationship.
I get 10 hours of my usage on my framework. It really depends on model and your setup.
My T480 has a very worn internal battery, but still does 8-10 hours. Thanks to the powerbridge I can hotswap a second battery to run for another 7 hours.
With mine (an Acer Aspire A515 I got for free from where my mom works) I get around 3 hours (according to the time remaining, although in longer use sessions at my desk I usually plug it in every hour or 2, and unplug it when its full), which is about the same as Windows thinks it is. So i would say it gets around the same battery life whether I use Windows or Linux
I just spent two weeks trying to convince a new intel Zenbook laptop to have decent battery life. It would eat the battery both awake and asleep. Went through the Arch wiki on suspend issues. Discovered that the bios has a broken vestigial S3 suspend (which more and more vendors are shipping); the modern suspend mode is now S0ix (s2idle). Found that my system was only getting into C2 and C3 out of C10 levels of S0ix power-saving-state nirvana.
Somehow, I lucked upon finding that the Intel Rapid Storage/VMD setting in bios was what kept the processor from ever going to lower power states. Once I disabled that, nearly everything else fell into place. The cpu ran cooler at normal use, battery lasted longer, and power burn during sleep went from 4% an hour to negligible.
This was fun. Not one tool successfully pointed me at the real problem. It took one random dell support post to set me on the right path. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211879. I spent two weeks chasing the same problem that somebody else had in 2021. Linux doesn’t have a [WARNING] for detecting a damned VMD, and it doesn’t have a means to tell the VMD to fuck off? The stupid hardware doesn’t have the sense to not fuck up the processor if it isn’t attached to its Windows-only driver? I don’t understand how anybody has been able to use an intel for the last couple of generations if this is how they work.
In conclusion - battery life is actually pretty great now. But it was a bloody nightmare to get here.
I can give you my opinion on a
GigabyteClevo Laptop.My laptop both ran to fast and hot which drained the battery. This was an issue in both Fedora and Manjaro.
I need to use different utilities to reign in the battery depending on the OS. Fedora it came out of the box but Manjaro I needed to install Slimbook Battery.
The other issue is the networking kills my sleep. Fedora was better with this than Manjaro, but newer versions of Manjaro kill WiFi when you put it to sleep. So it been better.
In comparison with windows while id like it to just work. Being able to tweak it is much preferable.
Using a Matebook running NixOS as my daily driver. Battery life is pleasingly good, lasting up to 9 hours. This without tinkering with battery settings at all.
I can only speak from experience, but all three of my Thinkpads last about 20-30% longer on Linux than Windows.
My old laptop got a new life after switching to minimalist linux instead of windows. So much longer battery time. Extended lifetime by years.
My thinkpads have always gone further on ubuntu than on windaz.
Some addition power management tools I suppose?
tlp is enough
Tlp and Intel xtu for undervolting (lowers temps and power consumption, but newer cpus don’t support it) are pretty good ideas. If battery life is your perogative, try avoiding discrete gpus, they can be a pain to make sure they don’t drain battery in Linux. 14hrs is possible, but you have to spec properly (think thinkpad t480 with dual batteries, and a low power display).
vanilla with no configuration.
Yeah my x1 carbon thinkpad has great battery life with Linux.
I’ll use power saver in fedora if needed.
My x1 carbon, with tlp and kubuntu, idling with screen on estimates 20 hours battery life. Haven’t had the patience to test it yet.
Is that just forcing the cpu scheduler? I use ubuntu-mate, and theres just a dropdown widget to switch between balanced/power/powersave.
My Dell XPS 13 is 20 minutes long, maybe 30 mins if I don’t use it. 4 years old laptop.
My lenovo yoga slim 7 pro x with a ryzen 6800hs consumed about 6 watts at idle when I used manjaro and i3 with auto-cpufreq. That meant it got around 8 hours of screen on time in the real world and up to 10 if I barely taxed it. Now on fedora with gnome and wayland and no tweaks it also consumes just over 6 watts at idle but we’ll we how it pans out. If there are any power tuning tips for gnome/wayland/amd I’d like to hear them. I don’t know if auto-cpufreq is still relevent with the newest kernels.
I doubt you can get 12h on an x86_64 computer, regardless of OS. With tweaks Linux can match Windows battery life but if you really need 12h get that M2 MacBook.
Got it. Get a MacBook and install Asahi Linux on it. 😅
Asahi doesn’t have CPU frequency management and will drain battery in 3h iirc
HP Elitebook 840 G5 here, doubled battery time after switching from Windows 10 to Debian 12.
Using a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i with 3070 and the batter life is regrettably similar. I desperately wish my Linux boot could dunk on the battery life of windows but it is extremely similar, which I guess I should take as a win.
Running Mint with 6.1 kernel, but have tried a slew of different builds and they are all within hitting distance. Again. I should be happy but I’ll only be happy if all the hours I have spent screwing with my OS leads to a clear win of some sort other than the intangible benefit of sticking it ever so slightly to MS.
Battery life on laptops is always over exaggerated regardless what OS you run.
12+ hours of actual battery life during use just doesn’t happen.
12+ hours of actual usage is doable on Apple Silicon, but it does depend on what your usage is. If you’re compiling something 50% of the time then probably not. If you spend most time writing code and then testing the application after compiling? Yeah it’ll last you 12.
I know that’s not what OP has and it’s not what they should get for Linux usage, but I’ve worked with 3 now (one personal, two at different jobs) and these things are the holy grail of battery life. First day on my M1 Air, taking it off the charger, 2 hours in it had used maybe 5% battery watching a udemy course and playing around in xcode.
So I think we should demand better of our laptops. I do believe AMD has done a lot, they had an entire generation where all they advertised was the increased power efficiency.
yeah I put Linux on my 2019 XPS 15 back in 2019 and went from 4 hours of usable productivity time to 4 hours of usable productivity time
battery degradation is a much bigger issue than Linux vs windows