Linux

My thinkpads have always gone further on ubuntu than on windaz.

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.

It depends on the distro and how you configure it.

For distros that just work out of the box like ubuntu or manjaro it should be about the same as windows unless there's something weird in your laptop, but in general there are 3 really useful tools that I recommend you check out are:

• TLPUI: a user interface for TLP, a power management tool that's used in most distros. With this you can configure your min/max clock speeds for your CPU and GPU when on battery vs plugged in, CPU governor, display brightness, automatic poweroff of drives and USB devices, and many other things
• throttled (https://github.com/erpalma/throttled): originally created to workaround a BIOS bug on some thinkpads, this can now set things like turbo duration, power limits and undervolting, all based on whether you're on battery or plugged in
• LACT: if you have an AMD GPU, you can use this to undervolt it or to set a better power limit

Setting these up properly on my thinkpad t480 with manjaro gave it a good 50-60% of extra battery life for what I use it for (I'm a teacher so mostly presentations and various IDEs). You should check them out.

It depends. If you get a fairly standard laptop from a brand that has some Linux awareness (Lenovo, Dell, Framework,...) you should be alright out of the box.

Gaming laptops generally are a bit worse since GPU switching is not as well integrated. I managed to get mine to parity but with a lot of tweaking. Devices with only integrated graphics tend to be fine out of the box.

It's very dependent on the laptop. Some ThinkPad get better battery life than on Linux because a lot of kernel devs use them.

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 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.

It really depends on the hardware and your use cases (ie. workflow).

I have a laptop (Dell Latitude 7420) with an integrated GPU (all Intel Tiger Lake), and I regularly get between 8 - 10 hours of battery life with just using terminals and web browsers (Firefox).

On GNOME, you will want to take advantage of the power profiles. With Pop, you can take advantage of their power management system. Otherwise, you can use something like TLP to minimize your power usage.

Moreover, if you are watching videos, then you want to make sure it is GPU accelerated and using the builtin hardware codecs rather than relying on the CPU to do the decoding.

I think that 12 hours on Linux on Intel/AMD is a stretch... but 8-10 hours is achievable and realistic (from my experience anyway).

I've installed a few distros on my gaming laptop for fun and something I've noticed was that your desktop environment may have a large impact on your battery life.

With Mint, my battery would die in like 2.5 hours. After installing Arch with the Budgie desktop environment, I've noticed that my battery life was twice as long as when it was running on Mint.

HP Elitebook 840 G5 here, doubled battery time after switching from Windows 10 to Debian 12.

I actually get 2x the battery life of windows on my ThinkPad. If you run a distro like Arch or Gentoo you will have to configure some things to get good battery life, but with Mint or something it just works™. If you want a whole lot of battery life you could get a laptop that has a replaceable battery, like the T480 (still plenty powerful for Linux), then your max life is limited only by how many extra batteries you are willing to carry.

Not bad at all. With some tweaking, it is commensurate with other operating systems.

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.

I've got a Surface Laptop 3 running Fedora that is always dead after an extended sleep. Actual working battery life is not bad though.

On my ThinkPad I get far more battery life than I ever did on windows

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.

My exceedingly old X230 with an inefficient sandy bridge chip gets 10 hours with normal light use. If I start using CAD or something more intensive it drops a bit, but it’s still likely there’s a machine that can do a 10 hour workday with your workload.

installed Linux Mint on various apple macbooks i got second hand and the battery life is abysmal.

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.

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.

I just installed openSUSE on my laptop, and I think it's actually better, mostly because it actually sleeps properly.

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

Using a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i with 3070 and the batter life is regrettably similar. I desperately wish my Linux boot could dunk on the battery life of windows but it is extremely similar, which I guess I should take as a win.

Running Mint with 6.1 kernel, but have tried a slew of different builds and they are all within hitting distance. Again. I should be happy but I'll only be happy if all the hours I have spent screwing with my OS leads to a clear win of some sort other than the intangible benefit of sticking it ever so slightly to MS.

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

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.

Lol I haven't had batteries in a laptop for years 😹

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.)

I can only speak from experience, but all three of my Thinkpads last about 20-30% longer on Linux than Windows.

A lot of the newer AMD models have excellent battery life thanks to the combined efforts of Vavle & AMD on the Steam Deck.

Use a desktop with power management and tlp, better than windows.

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.