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99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

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Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#71

Post by eloff »

martin1975 wrote: post #54
slashdev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a searing indictment of Linux. I get less than half the battery life on my Alienware AMD laptop under Linux than under Windows. I don't know what Linux is doing wrong here, but it is not energy efficient.

Why do you run Linux on Alienware hardware?

I run Linux for work, and gaming laptops tend to have the best performance characteristics. Plus I can play games on it with dual boot.

I got it for half the price of equivalent hardware in a MacBook Pro (8-cores/16 threads, 64 gb ram, 3 TB NVME storage, monster graphics card.)

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#72

Post by smoldesu »

daneel_w wrote: post #52
smoldesu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, 10 hours of battery life with a discrete GPU enabled is fairly unprecedented. Even the 16" Macbooks that shipped with discrete GPUs would struggle to sustain the CPU and GPU for 5 hours of parallel use.

Why would anyone, these days, need a discrete GPU for surfing the web? This detail, too, just like the CPU, falls short on the fact that making actual use of its power cuts battery time down to nothing. They should just market it for what it really is: a workstation laptop with 3 hours of battery life.

They also offer a version of this laptop without the discrete GPU if you need better battery life. There are still workloads that require local discrete GPU hardware though.

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#74

Post by smoldesu »

eropple wrote: post #70
smoldesu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, 10 hours of battery life with a discrete GPU enabled is fairly unprecedented. Even the 16" Macbooks that shipped with discrete GPUs would struggle to sustain the CPU and GPU for 5 hours of parallel use.

Did those not have automatic graphics switching? I tapped out of Intel MBPs around 2017, but AGS made using them pretty decent for the time.

They did, and technically the underpinnings exist for you to do the same thing on Linux (Nvidia PRIME render offloading). Generally though, if you're a 3D creator or ML researcher I could definitely see this machine making a case for itself.

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#75

Post by seabrookmx »

slashdev wrote: post #25
gandalfgeek wrote: post #19

Isn'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!

It's also a searing indictment of Linux. I get less than half the battery life on my Alienware AMD laptop under Linux than under Windows. I don't know what Linux is doing wrong here, but it is not energy efficient.

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 VSCode+Remote SSH extension. This is ~1/2 of what I can get in Windows.

I think a lot of Linux users would be surpised how good their battery life would be if they installed Windows on their laptops. It's not Linux's fault per se, it's just that there's considerably less engineering manpower going into tuning the power efficiency of laptop hardware on Linux. People get up in arms because they can't reconcile the fact that "Windows is bloated" with the fact that it gets better battery life, but if you think about it for a few seconds it really shouldn't surprise anyone.

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#77

Post by yamtaddle »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #19

Isn'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!

Some of it's the software being much better. See also: Android vs. iOS battery life. Android's gotten a little better over the years (for a good long while the difference was comically huge) but it's still the case that you need higher specs and a bigger battery to achieve similar apparent responsiveness and battery life with Android. And that's despite iOS bloating pretty badly over the last half-dozen versions.

Or see what happens when you use Chrome or Firefox instead of Safari on a MacBook. One of these three vendors plainly cares a lot about battery life. The other two do not care as much.

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#78

Post by pengaru »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #30
calvinmorrison wrote: post #22

My lenovo X220 has the most insane battery life I have ever had. I had the 9 Cell battery (compared to the 3 cell) with the additional backpack chassis battery that clipped on below. Just by itself the 9 cell was good for close to 10 hours. Extended battery was: 64.38Wh and the extended 9 cell was 94Wh. About a decade down the road, I still have about 50% battery life left in it at max charge and it still holds its o…

I have an X200 with a 9 cell battery, bought new a while ago, but I think 4h max is what I get, if I lower brightness and only run Emacs or so. How do you manage to run 10h? Does the X220 somehow use less?

Penryn->Sandy Bridge is a pretty big leap.

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#79

Post by yamtaddle »

zdragnar wrote: post #38
eloff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not. I use some extra software to try and improve that, which helps, but it also means the laptop is noticably laggy on battery. But you're right that is likely part of the equation. I don't think it's the whole story though, I see other people complaining of wise than Windows battery life on laptops that do support Linux.

I've got an lg gram that I use for day-to-day life, and the battery on linux and windows is more or less identical. I think the biggest thing is not having a discrete GPU.

I've personally sworn off discrete GPUs in laptops entirely. My direct and observational experience over a couple decades has been that they cause something like half the major problems in laptops, despite not being present in all of them. Your odds of not having any serious problems over, say, a five-year laptop lifespan are dramatically lower without a discrete GPU.

[EDIT] And that's even true for Apple laptops, IME.

Re: 99Wh Battery Linux Laptop

#80

Post by trelane »

seabrookmx wrote: post #75
slashdev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a searing indictment of Linux. I get less than half the battery life on my Alienware AMD laptop under Linux than under Windows. I don't know what Linux is doing wrong here, but it is not energy efficient.

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…

I'm not convinced Framework actually supports Linux, though. AFAICT, it supports Windows and can ship with no OS, and you have to do the rest yourself. To predictable end (e.g. having to deal with kernel parameters to make it work.)

The firmware involved is also distinctly non-trivial.

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