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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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
My old laptop got a new life after switching to minimalist linux instead of windows. So much longer battery time. Extended lifetime by 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.
deleted by creator
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.
HP Elitebook 840 G5 here, doubled battery time after switching from Windows 10 to Debian 12.
Depends on the device. Some devices are horrible but some last for 18+ hours.
I’m sporting 8-10h on my Tuxedo Pulse 15 (Gen 1)
At least with AMD my runtime was always pretty good under Linux. Since some years at least. Was on Intel before and always had worse battery life with Linux - most probably because of the additional NVidia GPU, that didn’t play nicely with Linux power management
I get 10 hours of my usage on my framework. It really depends on model and your setup.
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.
A lot of the newer AMD models have excellent battery life thanks to the combined efforts of Vavle & AMD on the Steam Deck.
I can only speak from experience, but all three of my Thinkpads last about 20-30% longer on Linux than Windows.
Not bad at all. With some tweaking, it is commensurate with other operating systems.
It’s very dependent on the laptop. Some ThinkPad get better battery life than on Linux because a lot of kernel devs use them.
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.
My X1 Carbon gets about 15% better battery life with PopOS vs. Windows.
Considering my gaming laptop, it does 1h on Linux and, if I recall correctly, 2hrs on Windows. You can pick a laptop with a good Linux support so that you can have a good battery life
Yeah gaming laptops are notoriously bad at battery life, regardless of the OS.
