I work for a smartphone and found that tuning for the battery is hard, labor intensive work. And you also need awareness from the app developer whose apps do use the battery. Plus you need a lot of users to justify these efforts to be get paid. It's not technical superiority but more about the economy of scale. I bet Linux is much more energy efficient in datacenters than Windows because of this reason.
99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
111–120 of 245 posts
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's not Linux's fault per se It IS linux's fault, in the way that whenever someone new comes into the ecosystem and says "hey this important thing doesn't work well or is broken for me" and get accosted from all directions by crazy people who haven't touched mac or windows in 20 years who insist that what you describe isn't possible, linux is super easy to fix yourself (lol), and that ideas from computing in the 60…
I think Linux is not less efficient than other major OSes. I am able to squeeze 5% more battery from a MacBook Air 11'' Late 2012 using Linux vs macOS. This is possible because the machine is basically a pure Intel device, so in-kernel support for most hardware components is good. The key aspect is to implement fairly aggressive udev rules and to use no desktop environment, so that the CPU stays in powersaving states…
I think a lot of this boils down to the distribution you install, what kind of background services it runs, and how effective its energy tunings are.
As an example, IMO an idle computer should have all CPU save one or two at 0% utilization, and that remaining CPU(s) shouldn't be averaging more than a few percent, in short spiky bursts. FreeBSD or Debian are like this, but Ubuntu is not.
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#113I work for a smartphone and found that tuning for the battery is hard, labor intensive work. And you also need awareness from the app developer whose apps do use the battery. Plus you need a lot of users to justify these efforts to be get paid. It's not technical superiority but more about the economy of scale. I bet Linux is much more energy efficient in datacenters than Windows because of this reason.
you work for a smartphone?
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and to use no desktop environment, Why do people write comments like this as though it's reasonable way to use an everyday driver PC? "I don't use a DE" - well then yes, obviously but you've also removed like 80% of the functionality to turn the thing into a dumb console. That's not what I want to use a computer for.
No, DE doesn't mean I have a dumb console. It just means it's a bit lighter. I have all services a modern desktop has, I still run X plus a window manager. I imagine Xfce or even GNOME 3 can be tweaked a bit to be almost equally energy efficient.
> no desktop environment
> I have all services a modern desktop has
LMAO
I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of Linux apologists in your replies but my experience is exactly the same _with a laptop that supports Linux_ (Framework laptop). I'm running a very recent kernel in Fedora and have tried numerous power saving mechanisms (currently autocpufreq, although it's results are not much different from gnome PPD) and I'm lucky if I get 3 hours from the thing while running 10-15 FF tabs and a single instance of V…
>It's not Linux's fault per se It IS linux's fault, in the way that whenever someone new comes into the ecosystem and says "hey this important thing doesn't work well or is broken for me" and get accosted from all directions by crazy people who haven't touched mac or windows in 20 years who insist that what you describe isn't possible, linux is super easy to fix yourself (lol), and that ideas from computing in the 60…
I agree with everything you said except for the window manager comment. i3/sway puts MacOS and Windows to shame. I could get used to my work macbook if only it would let me move focus in more than one dimension (i.e. super+left/right/up/down instead of cmd+tab back in time).
MacOS is especially bad because they don't even try to address their deficiencies. They just bandaid over it with an app ecosystem and then don't give that ecosystem an API that's to sufficient to do the job (e.g. the limitations of amethyst and amphetamine re: focus control and lid closing).
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and to use no desktop environment, Why do people write comments like this as though it's reasonable way to use an everyday driver PC? "I don't use a DE" - well then yes, obviously but you've also removed like 80% of the functionality to turn the thing into a dumb console. That's not what I want to use a computer for.
No, DE doesn't mean I have a dumb console. It just means it's a bit lighter. I have all services a modern desktop has, I still run X plus a window manager. I imagine Xfce or even GNOME 3 can be tweaked a bit to be almost equally energy efficient.
[deleted]
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#117So, I can spend 16 hours in the torture of typing on a crap keyboard. Great :-(
Seriously, why don't laptop makers understand that a "workstation" needs a decent non-chicklet keyboard?
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, DE doesn't mean I have a dumb console. It just means it's a bit lighter. I have all services a modern desktop has, I still run X plus a window manager. I imagine Xfce or even GNOME 3 can be tweaked a bit to be almost equally energy efficient.
> no desktop environment > I have all services a modern desktop has LMAO I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.
> I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.
Before making offensive comments, have you thought about the meaning of my statement?
For example, a modern DE offers desktop notifications. I still have that by running a desktop notification daemon, dunst, despite just using X plus a window manager but no DE.
Linux is very much broken into small composable components, the same way Clojure is. To take this comparison further, it is extremely ignorant to claim you can't have the same functionality Rails offers just because you don't use a big framework (which is the equivalent to a DE).
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#119Isn't it a searing indictment of the entire Intel laptop chip lineup that a MacBook Air M1 has half the battery capacity (50Wh) while giving easily twice the battery life with as good or better performance -- and with no fans!
Asahi Linux has way better battery performance than any typical x86 laptop almost entirely because of the M1 chip itself [1].
Apparently part of the genius of the chip is that they baked a large chunk of the power management logic into the chip itself.
I think Linux has work it could do to be more efficient, but really we should just be mad at Intel/AMD for not doing what Apple did years ago. They never even offered an option for those willing to sacrifice compatibility. And now they're going to start looking the entire portable electronics market (little bit hyperbole, but I don't see my self buying any new computer that isn't an M1 something for a long time especially as Asahi Linux is making such good progress and I can use Linux on whatever Apple releases in the future).
[1]: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20...
Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's not Linux's fault per se It IS linux's fault, in the way that whenever someone new comes into the ecosystem and says "hey this important thing doesn't work well or is broken for me" and get accosted from all directions by crazy people who haven't touched mac or windows in 20 years who insist that what you describe isn't possible, linux is super easy to fix yourself (lol), and that ideas from computing in the 60…
I agree with everything you said except for the window manager comment. i3/sway puts MacOS and Windows to shame. I could get used to my work macbook if only it would let me move focus in more than one dimension (i.e. super+left/right/up/down instead of cmd+tab back in time). MacOS is especially bad because they don't even try to address their deficiencies. They just bandaid over it with an app ecosystem and then don'…
100% this. I'm using a Windows notebook at work, and I cannot go for a single week without running into some random window management bug. Despite it being the origin of its name, Windows is actually really bad at windows stuff.
And that's before we get into intentionally missing features like focus-on-hover.