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.
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.
Some addition power management tools I suppose?
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).
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.
I get 10 hours of my usage on my framework. It really depends on model and your setup.
It’s very dependent on the laptop. Some ThinkPad get better battery life than on Linux because a lot of kernel devs use them.
My X1 Carbon gets about 15% better battery life with PopOS vs. Windows.
That’s new info for me thanks. Never knew thinkpad can excel in this department.
It depends on the ThinkPad. They’re not all created equally and the quality between models varies wildly.
I use a 2020 hp envy 360 with a ryzen 4700u. I can get away all day typing or websurfing indoors. I can also drain the battery in two hours by playing games.
One of the things I like, is how easy it is to govern the cpu. If I know I’m away from a wall for a bit I can govern the cpu to 1.4ghz and it’ll last a long time. I haven’t actually done any testing to see how long.
My Tuxedo Pulse 15 (Gen 1) had 12h of battery life doing office work, when it was new. Now with some degradation, it still gets 9h. Of course that changes heavily depending on workload and screen brightness
A lot of the newer AMD models have excellent battery life thanks to the combined efforts of Vavle & AMD on the Steam Deck.
It depends on a few factors. Stock laptop experience with no power management software will likely result in poor battery life. You will need some kind of power management like TLP, auto-cpufreq, or powertop to handle your laptop’s power management settings.
Second is the entire issue of dedicated GPUs and hybrid graphics in laptops, which can be a real issue for Linux laptops. In my own laptop with a dGPU, I am reasonably certain that the dGPU simply never turns off. I have yet to figure out a working solution for this, and so my battery life seems to be consistently worse than the Windows install dual-booted with it on the same machine.
If your dGPU supports rtd3 power management, it should (almost) completely power off when not in use. For me the battery life changes a lot: is something like 2 hr vs 10hr battery life with the GPU off, which is very noticeable.
In everything I have seen, there has been no way to turn it off fully (laptop with a GTX 1060). Nvidia x server settings shows no option for a power saver mode, and even Optimus-manager set to integrated graphics only does not seem to have changed it. It seems to continuously idle at the minimum clock speed at around 5W of draw, according to programs like nvtop.
On my Linux laptop with a Nvidia card, there is a Nvidia program which lets you switch between dedicated or on-board graphics, or on-demand where applications can request the graphics card. Before that the dedicated card was always on. I’m on mobile at the moment, but there is an official Nvidia website with drivers and other programs to control this. I assume the same for AMD, but I haven’t checked.
Do you have any recollection of the name, or a link? I have the nvidia xserver settings gui program, but I do not see any option to put the GPU into a powersave mode.
Nvidia Optimus and the selector I’m using is MATE Optimus
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’ve never really noticed a huge difference with the Dell XPS models we use at my work. There’s a developer edition of that laptop that ships with Ubuntu, though, so they might have more optimizations than some manufacturers.
I think most people would recommend getting a laptop that has manufacturer support for Linux, which includes dedicated Linux laptop companies (like System76) but also certain Dell and Lenovo models. (There’s several others too. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.)
Yep I’m looking at system76. Not sure about how valid the 14h battery life claim is though. That seems awfully optimistic on a 10-core Intel chip.
I have a System76 Pangolin 11 with the Ryzen 7 and the battery life is trash. It would die on me during meetings from a full charge if I was sharing my screen. Not blaming System76 on this one, its probably the AMD chipset all things considered.
Replaced it with the Thinkpad X13 Gen 2 and love it. Easily gets 8 to 10 hours on OpenSUSE, and everything just works.
It really depends on the hardware and your use cases (ie. workflow).
I have a laptop (Dell Latitude 7420) with an integrated GPU (all Intel Tiger Lake), and I regularly get between 8 - 10 hours of battery life with just using terminals and web browsers (Firefox).
On GNOME, you will want to take advantage of the power profiles. With Pop, you can take advantage of their power management system. Otherwise, you can use something like TLP to minimize your power usage.
Moreover, if you are watching videos, then you want to make sure it is GPU accelerated and using the builtin hardware codecs rather than relying on the CPU to do the decoding.
I think that 12 hours on Linux on Intel/AMD is a stretch… but 8-10 hours is achievable and realistic (from my experience anyway).
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.
I’ve got a Surface Laptop 3 running Fedora that is always dead after an extended sleep. Actual working battery life is not bad though.
It’s worth knowing as a fellow Surface owner that that is very nonstandard. My Surface Pro 6 (admittedly much newer) lasts days or weeks if I just slap the lid closed and leave it somewhere, I think you might be missing something in the linux-surface github.
To any non-surface owners reading this, it’s a Microsoft problem because the whole laptop is a custom Microsoft product and only has ACPI drivers on Windows, though, there is some open source support with a kernel patch that hasn’t cleared it’s way to mainline support
I pull kernels from the Linux surface repo, so I would expect to have whatever’s latest
Use a desktop with power management and tlp, better than windows.
yeah, just haul a desktop around for 12 hours. I’m sure you can find an IEC cord long enough
I meant desktop environment.
