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.
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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.
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
HP Elitebook 840 G5 here, doubled battery time after switching from Windows 10 to Debian 12.
Gaming laptops will have marginally worse battery life when properly configured. But in general you’ll get better battery life on Linux in my experience.
I have an older 6th gen Intel XPS that probably lasted 7 hours max on windows and I get 6+ on Linux. Not really noticeable to me. I should have gotten the 1080p screen instead of this 4k monstrosity and battery life would have gone up 50%. The thing is also a beast at sleeping and will go well over 2 weeks before the battery drains. Which is great because I just use it on the couch now and will open it up for a few minutes here and there before shoving it back between the cushions again.
Last year I got a 12th gen framework and battery life is disappointing under Linux. Maybe 5ish hours. I can live with that but when sleeping it still drains like 25% a day.
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.
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.
Flat out superior to Windows. All that is needed is TLP and PowerTop.
Thanks to you I just found out that I DID enable wake-on-lan a year ago and that there’s another reason I couldn’t do it.
This is what’s important. If you don’t enable power saving in some fashion, your hardware will always be “on” at full specs. Even if the machine isn’t actually being used, it’s still powering everything to be ready to jump at any opportunity to process something quickly without ramping down.
TLP has pretty excellent default settings. Simply turning it on will likely make your battery life go 2-3x longer than without it being on, and you will have about 80% of the performance from a UX perspective. And if you want to crunch numbers faster on battery, you can tune TLP or turn it off temporarily.
Lol I haven’t had batteries in a laptop for years 😹
On r/thinkpad (I think), I at some point read about the AMD powered machines having extraordinary battery life on Linux, to the degree that I regretted my very recent Intel ThinkPad purchase. Maybe that’s something to search for. I think it was the new T14.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
