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Does anyone use linux on a laptop and mind mentioning the battery life they get? I joke that I'm trapped by apple because it's the only way to get battery life

by cheriot 10y ago

Does anyone use linux on a laptop and mind mentioning the battery life they get? I joke that I'm trapped by apple because it's the only way to get battery life and POSIX on the same machine.

divbit 10y ago
I ran lubuntu full time from 2012-2015 on my main laptop (also had a windows.tablet for onenote), and the battery life was better than the original installed os. I'm not sure about full Ubuntu..
stormbrew 10y ago
I use Ubuntu on a tricked out yoga 900 and I plug it in about once every two days or so when I'm using it somewhat actively. At full charge it reports having 9-11h of charge, but I've never verified that that's accurate. I haven't really felt much need to because that's pretty much a "don't worry about it" amount of time between charges for me. Mind you it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, but I would avoid that like a plague on a laptop running Linux for various reasons. Intel graphics tend to just work.
habitue 10y ago
I use Ubuntu 16.04 on an X1 carbon 4th gen and the battery life is fine, I haven't had to worry about it. Probably 7-8 hours of normal coding, browsing etc?
favadi 10y ago
I installed Ubuntu MacBook Pro 2015, without any modification they get like 1-2 hours battery life, with powertop/TLP installed it can last for 4-5 hours. Stock macOS lasts 9-10 hours for me.
lhl 10y ago
I picked up an X250 last year w/ the extended 6-cell battery primarily for the better battery life. With TLP setup, I'm able to get 8-10hrs of battery life w/o issues (I've gotten up to 13hrs if all I'm doing is editing text). According to powertop, I can get power usage to go to over 18W on full load (100% CPU/DRAM, 100% display backlight), but under my normal setup (wifi, 30% display backlight) idle power consumption is about 4.8W - my idle states never goes below C6/pc6 even running the latest 4.8 kernels. (Did the SATA power state stuff ever get fixed?)
hobarrera 10y ago
My 2013 MBA says ~10hs when idle. In reality, I tend to get around 7hs of actual usage.
gravypod 10y ago
Thinkpad x220 running TLP with extended battery covers all day (sometimes 7AM to 9PM) of browsing and CLion & PyCharm. I'm a student so the only time it's not being used heavily is when I'm walking from class to class. As the other comment said I get about 5W draw in powertop. All I've done is install TLP as the other comment says. Something else you can do if you'd like to get a huge boon for battery life is get a slice battery [0]. Get both the extended and slice and you'll be able to probably go 20hr. [0] - http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/all-day-long-all-day-strong-our-new-x220-slice-battery http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/all-day-long-all-day-strong-o...
reirob 10y ago
Using Ubuntu 14.04LTS for one year on a T450s (20GB, 1GB SSD) - it has two batteries and you can switch one of them while running the system on the built-in battery. With the big battery I can work the whole day without having to charge, something like 10 hours are possible for coding and working on documents and running some VMs. I consider it the best laptop I ever had.

by cheriot 10y ago

Does anyone use linux on a laptop and mind mentioning the battery life they get? I joke that I'm trapped by apple because it's the only way to get battery life and POSIX on the same machine.

divbit 10y ago

I ran lubuntu full time from 2012-2015 on my main laptop (also had a windows.tablet for onenote), and the battery life was better than the original installed os. I'm not sure about full Ubuntu..

stormbrew 10y ago

I use Ubuntu on a tricked out yoga 900 and I plug it in about once every two days or so when I'm using it somewhat actively. At full charge it reports having 9-11h of charge, but I've never verified that that's accurate. I haven't really felt much need to because that's pretty much a "don't worry about it" amount of time between charges for me. Mind you it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, but I would avoid that like a plague on a laptop running Linux for various reasons. Intel graphics tend to just work.

habitue 10y ago

I use Ubuntu 16.04 on an X1 carbon 4th gen and the battery life is fine, I haven't had to worry about it. Probably 7-8 hours of normal coding, browsing etc?

favadi 10y ago

I installed Ubuntu MacBook Pro 2015, without any modification they get like 1-2 hours battery life, with powertop/TLP installed it can last for 4-5 hours. Stock macOS lasts 9-10 hours for me.

lhl 10y ago

I picked up an X250 last year w/ the extended 6-cell battery primarily for the better battery life. With TLP setup, I'm able to get 8-10hrs of battery life w/o issues (I've gotten up to 13hrs if all I'm doing is editing text). According to powertop, I can get power usage to go to over 18W on full load (100% CPU/DRAM, 100% display backlight), but under my normal setup (wifi, 30% display backlight) idle power consumption is about 4.8W - my idle states never goes below C6/pc6 even running the latest 4.8 kernels. (Did the SATA power state stuff ever get fixed?)

hobarrera 10y ago

My 2013 MBA says ~10hs when idle. In reality, I tend to get around 7hs of actual usage.

gravypod 10y ago

Thinkpad x220 running TLP with extended battery covers all day (sometimes 7AM to 9PM) of browsing and CLion & PyCharm. I'm a student so the only time it's not being used heavily is when I'm walking from class to class. As the other comment said I get about 5W draw in powertop. All I've done is install TLP as the other comment says. Something else you can do if you'd like to get a huge boon for battery life is get a slice battery [0]. Get both the extended and slice and you'll be able to probably go 20hr. [0] - http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/all-day-long-all-day-strong-our-new-x220-slice-battery http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/all-day-long-all-day-strong-o...

reirob 10y ago

Using Ubuntu 14.04LTS for one year on a T450s (20GB, 1GB SSD) - it has two batteries and you can switch one of them while running the system on the built-in battery. With the big battery I can work the whole day without having to charge, something like 10 hours are possible for coding and working on documents and running some VMs. I consider it the best laptop I ever had.