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.
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.
I get 10 hours of my usage on my framework. It really depends on model and your setup.
My Dell XPS 13 is 20 minutes long, maybe 30 mins if I don’t use it. 4 years old laptop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
cpufreqwhen 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-smicommand.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.
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.
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.
- Limit the CPU boost frequency to something more reasonable using
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