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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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[–] 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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