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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
On my ThinkPad I get far more battery life than I ever did on windows
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.
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.
It’s very dependent on the laptop. Some ThinkPad get better battery life than on Linux because a lot of kernel devs use them.
Depends on the device. Some devices are horrible but some last for 18+ hours.
It’s around the same for me, altough windows is slightly better when battery saver is activated (hp pavilion 14 with an i7 1255u, windows 11 and fedora 38)
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im getting pretty similar results to what it was on windows i think. endevouros kde on lenovo yoga, with tlp conservation mode when charging.
My old laptop got a new life after switching to minimalist linux instead of windows. So much longer battery time. Extended lifetime by years.
