5 ms·

Are Linux applications going to use a lot of battery? Do they have wakelocks or something similar?

curt15 9y ago
This. Shorter battery life than in Windows is a frequent complaint about Linux on laptops, and for handheld computers battery life really needs to be a top priority.
- akerro 9y ago
  RedHat is working on it, you can signup to be a tester: https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/18412.html https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/18412.html
- brunoqc 9y ago
  Better battery usage for laptops is always a goal but I was thinking more in the sense that mobile OS have patterns to reduce battery usage. Android Oreo is even moving away from wakelocks. I guess it's not good enough and Linux apps don't even use that.
Elv13 9y ago
(KDE dev here) It is still an issue, but it's getting better. As far as I am concerned, Ring-KDE (a phone and Skype alternative app) is still eating too much power. It is a work in progress and is already much better than it was a couple months ago. Some of the dependencies my app use are also power hungry. This needs to be fixed. However it's nothing that can't be fixed. Enough profiling and powertop work will get us there.
- akerro 9y ago
  Ex-Tox developer here: >Ring-KDE (a phone and Skype alternative app) is still eating too much power. This will always be a nature of Ring and Tox because it uses DHT network to find peers and keep connections alive, this is CPU-hungry, therefore power consuming and it won't be accepted on mobile platforms. Also losing network connectivity for 3 seconds causes the client to reconnect to the network, find peers again, messages can be lost... Matrix is the way to go.
  - Elv13 9y ago
    No. The way I plan to fix it is having "dht services" where you can delegate the mobile device burden to another node. As we use SIP and it supports such topology, it's not much of a problem.
gue5t 9y ago
Depends on your application. Run the programs you want to run on this and open powertop. It can also be informative to run them under strace and see whether their mainloops spin or wait; any well-written program sleeps until it has real work to do.

This. Shorter battery life than in Windows is a frequent complaint about Linux on laptops, and for handheld computers battery life really needs to be a top priority.

akerro 9y ago
RedHat is working on it, you can signup to be a tester: https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/18412.html https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/18412.html
brunoqc 9y ago
Better battery usage for laptops is always a goal but I was thinking more in the sense that mobile OS have patterns to reduce battery usage. Android Oreo is even moving away from wakelocks. I guess it's not good enough and Linux apps don't even use that.

Elv13 9y ago

(KDE dev here) It is still an issue, but it's getting better. As far as I am concerned, Ring-KDE (a phone and Skype alternative app) is still eating too much power. It is a work in progress and is already much better than it was a couple months ago. Some of the dependencies my app use are also power hungry. This needs to be fixed. However it's nothing that can't be fixed. Enough profiling and powertop work will get us there.

akerro 9y ago
Ex-Tox developer here: >Ring-KDE (a phone and Skype alternative app) is still eating too much power. This will always be a nature of Ring and Tox because it uses DHT network to find peers and keep connections alive, this is CPU-hungry, therefore power consuming and it won't be accepted on mobile platforms. Also losing network connectivity for 3 seconds causes the client to reconnect to the network, find peers again, messages can be lost... Matrix is the way to go.
- Elv13 9y ago
  No. The way I plan to fix it is having "dht services" where you can delegate the mobile device burden to another node. As we use SIP and it supports such topology, it's not much of a problem.

gue5t 9y ago

Depends on your application. Run the programs you want to run on this and open powertop. It can also be informative to run them under strace and see whether their mainloops spin or wait; any well-written program sleeps until it has real work to do.