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You will not get the battery life on Linux until GPU drivers are finished at the very least, and a bunch of other stuff. If it's non-negotiable for you, I woul

You will not get the battery life on Linux until GPU drivers are finished at the very least, and a bunch of other stuff. If it's non-negotiable for you, I would suggest alternative options. There are now laptops with similar CPU performance and better GPU performance, with comparable battery life (I get 12 hours idle or browsing websites that aren't too demanding). It doesn't make sense to go with an M1 Mac as a Linux machine unless you really need it to be ARM.

Underphil 5y ago
I don't mean to be rude, but what in the parent comment lead to you believe they were looking for suggestions?
pmontra 5y ago
Which laptop do you use?
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Any laptop with latest-generation AMD processors, efficient RAM, and an efficient SSD will work. I use an Alienware m15 r5 Ryzen edition wiht an RTX 3070 - I get around 13h of battery life on idle (low screen brightness, 60hz), and around 8-10h doing work - that means Firefox, CLion, Dolphin, and a few terminal windows open. - but compiling rather infrequently, perhaps spending 2% of my time compiling. This is with 1 NVMe SSD installed - my other NVMe SSD is quite inefficient and drops battery life. I also run KDE with a lot of blur and eye-candy enabled and a bunch of extra stuff that eats battery. If you really push battery saving to the very maximum, you can get power consumption with a similar setup at around 7W, which means a battery life of around 12 hours with a daily workload. However, as it is now, I am using between 7 and 9 watts, which results in a battery life of around 10 hours. To get this to work on Arch Linux however, it was a serious headache, took me around 9 hours of work. This seems comparable to what my friends with an M1 Pro MBP, 14", report, which is 8-9h on essentially the same workload. I get better power consumption on Windows, however, unless I fully and completely disable the dedicated GPU (I use hybrid graphics).

Underphil 5y ago

I don't mean to be rude, but what in the parent comment lead to you believe they were looking for suggestions?

pmontra 5y ago

Which laptop do you use?

sudosysgen 5y ago
Any laptop with latest-generation AMD processors, efficient RAM, and an efficient SSD will work. I use an Alienware m15 r5 Ryzen edition wiht an RTX 3070 - I get around 13h of battery life on idle (low screen brightness, 60hz), and around 8-10h doing work - that means Firefox, CLion, Dolphin, and a few terminal windows open. - but compiling rather infrequently, perhaps spending 2% of my time compiling. This is with 1 NVMe SSD installed - my other NVMe SSD is quite inefficient and drops battery life. I also run KDE with a lot of blur and eye-candy enabled and a bunch of extra stuff that eats battery. If you really push battery saving to the very maximum, you can get power consumption with a similar setup at around 7W, which means a battery life of around 12 hours with a daily workload. However, as it is now, I am using between 7 and 9 watts, which results in a battery life of around 10 hours. To get this to work on Arch Linux however, it was a serious headache, took me around 9 hours of work. This seems comparable to what my friends with an M1 Pro MBP, 14", report, which is 8-9h on essentially the same workload. I get better power consumption on Windows, however, unless I fully and completely disable the dedicated GPU (I use hybrid graphics).