In my experience, the desktop doesn't matter that much. I typically get over 8 hours on my 47Wh battery 13" HP Envy. Watching powertop, the biggest consumers

In my experience, the desktop doesn't matter that much. I typically get over 8 hours on my 47Wh battery 13" HP Envy. Watching powertop, the biggest consumers for my battery after the screen are: - the keyboard backlight (1W) - bluetooth left on - pulseaudio needing a restart (fuck pulseaudio's session management) - iwlwifi power saving mode being misconfigured - Skype If any of these situations are happening then I only get 4 to 6 hours. Short bursts of CPU/GPU activity like desktop transitions don't last long enough to make a significant impact. Other than Skype being poorly written, this stuff could all be automatically detected by a daemon or by the software itself.