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How bad is battery life on Linux laptop? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

Pretty bad. My gaming laptop gets 2 hours on Arch and 4 on Windows. My work laptop gets 4 hours on Arch compared to 6 hours on Windows. My 2-in-1 laptop from 8 years ago gets about the same, if not more. My 2009 laptop gets like 8 hours, and probably more than Windows would.

Edit: I use auto-cpufreq, but this doesn't help much. Power-profiles helps a little.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Gaming laptops are a bit worse on Linux. But this isn't generally applicable.

    I have a 2015 ultrabook that still gets 5h+ on battery under Linux. My 2022 gaming laptop required some tweaking but now does 8-10h on a charge as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    My work laptop doesn't have a discrete GPU; I bought it explicitly to get better battery life (I really like the gaming laptop for its 120Hz screen and other specs, but the battery life made it a no-go). It gets around 4-5 hours, which is good enough for me, but I'm sure it would get better battery life on Windows.

    How did you get better battery life on the gaming laptop, if you don't mind my asking? It uses a NVIDIA GPU.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I made a script that monitors the power state of the laptop and automatically toggles the following things:

    • Limit the CPU boost frequency to something more reasonable using cpufreq when not plugged in.
    • I limit the GPU to 32W when on battery and 42W when charging over USB-C, while giving it the unrestricted 100W when running from the normal power charger. I tried fully turning off the GPU but there's no measurable benefit in battery life compared to this setup (GPU goes to ~0W when idle anyway).
    • I set refresh rate of the display to 60hz on battery (144hz when plugged in)
    • I turn of half the cores of my 8 core CPU om battery (this is pretty aggressive, and does not result in better battery life on all platforms - your mileage may vary)

    That takes me from 4-5h to ~8-10 and the computer is still very useable.

    Mine is an AMD device but Nvidia offers similar toggles through the nvidia-smi command.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it's mostly the 120Hz display that's killing my battery life...which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I'll have to give these things a try!

    Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I'm based.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yes, it was slim pickings. I tried a couple last year and finally ended up keeping an all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14.

    Others I tried:

    • MSI Delta 15: overall best performing of the bunch, returned it because of somewhat substandard machining and build quality. Linux worked perfectly out of the box.
    • Medion Erazer Major: Intel Arc laptop. Good performance but couldn't get the battery life up to good standards
    • Lenovo Legion S7 16: just stopped booting after a week
    • Asus Zephyrus G14: small, light, excellent quality, but a little bit of tweaking getting everything working

    Today I would just preorder a Framework 16.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14

    That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.

    Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM's network to do so). I didn't get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately...

    I've heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don't know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I couldn't find one locally either. Ended up ordering a returned product from Amazon abroad, a friend of mine then shipped it over. The stuff I do to avoid Nvidia...

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    I was buying a new laptop subsidized on 80% store credit, so I could only go for what they had in stock, unfortunately. I still haven't had a single computer with an AMD GPU, but iGPU laptops give me a taste of what things could be like without NVIDIA...

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