11 ms·

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 ba

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!

shrubble 4y ago
My Dell Latitude 7490, 16GB DDR4 with i7-8650U, 60Wh battery, gets very good battery life under Devuan, 7 hours+ I think with my usage. My belief is that it varies between Linux distributions a great deal.
slashdev 4y ago
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.
- jchw 4y ago
  Does that laptop support Linux? If not, I'd expect a key reason is simple; it likely is not using all of the power saving functionality supported by the laptop. This might include things like S0ix, throttling, proper sleep states, etc. There's a lot of factors going in, and I think by and large it is not actually an endemic issue with Linux itself. Consider for example that x86 Chromebooks have no issue fully exploiting modern x86 power saving features and getting good battery life.
  - eloff 4y ago
    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.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      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.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        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.
    - jchw 4y ago
      The thing is, there aren't really that many laptops designed to run Linux. Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later. Sure, this feels like a cop-out and is not really of much aid to anybody, but it's only fair to note. Generally, I do not have dramatically worse battery life on Linux vs Windows, but I also did stop buying laptops with NVIDIA graphics. (Irrespective of Linux, these have given me tons of trouble. Even on Windows, external displays were a painful experience on my Thinkpad P52 no matter what mux settings were set in firmware. I guess it works out OK since NVIDIA on Linux is far from ideal at the moment.)
      - pxc 4y ago
        > Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later. System76 does get complete hardware specs from the chipset manufacturer, though, and their cooperation in porting an open-source firmware to the motherboard. They run Coreboot instead of the proprietary OEM UEFIs, and this has let them achieve some nice things in power management (including MacBook-like instant on from sleep and hibernation, for example) on some models. I'm still excited for the first systems where they get to do the physical design as well, but their firmware work on their rebadged laptops is substantial and relevant to the power efficiency issue.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Run powertop as root and go to the analysis tab https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/powertop https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/powertop
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Suppose I want to reverse engineer all of my laptop's power saving features and write drivers for them or whatever it is that Linux needs to work properly. How do I begin? I managed to get as far as dumping ACPI DSDT but I couldn't figure out where to go from there. I got all the extra USB features working. It should be possible to support everything else too. If I learn this I'll add support for all the laptops I buy in the future too.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  For me it's the exact opposite: I can't get the Linux battery life on Windows without turning Windows down into a stutterfest. Windows is also noisy as hell. It all comes down to driver support. If you manufacturer doesn't have proper drivers, your experience will suck. It says a lot about Lenovo that open source Linux drivers work better than their proprietary ones, but that probably comes with the territory if you combine Intel and Nvidia.
- jcims 4y ago
  This used to be the other way around. I worked for a laptop company (Winbook!) in the 90s and Windows 3.x and IIRC even (early) Windows 95 were largely oblivious to power management features. These laptops had no fan and the bottom of the case acted as a heatsink. (We would regularly get calls from customers complaining about damage to their tables/desks). One thing I noticed almost immediately when running linux is that when I was just farting around learning the OS, the laptop would get stone cold. But when I did something large, like compile a kernel, while the laptop was actually on my lap I could physically feel the heat from the CPU start to leak through the case.
- dimensionc132 4y ago
- bipson 4y ago
  Alienware? I suspect you have a dedicated graphics card? Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough". I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Probably an Optimus setup on the Windows side. It basically powers down the graphics card most of the time and switches to the lighter Intel graphics instead. Linux support for Optimus is poor and usually you end up having to choose either good battery life or good gaming performance.
    - eloff 4y ago
      This is likely it as the AMD CPU has a built-in low power Radeon GPU, and there's a monster Nvidia card for gaming. Do you know how I can check if the discrete card is being used / drawing power?
      - pxc 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure Intel `powertop` can tell you, but if it can't tell you directly you can measure the difference in power consumption depending on whether the dGPU is enabled in the BIOS.
      - matheusmoreira 4y ago
        I don't know about AMD but nvidia cards have a management interface that provides useful data like temperatures, load and wattage. AMD should have something similar. I wrote a script to query that data and output it in a format compatible with i3status. In case you'd like to see how it works: https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.local/bin/nvidia-smi.py https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.loca... Please share the changes if you figure out an AMD solution. I'm curious.
- martin1975 4y ago
  Why do you run Linux on Alienware hardware?
  - eloff 4y ago
    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.)
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    In my case at least: because it was hard to find non-gamer laptops with fast CPUs. Turned out to be a moot point anyway because the thing throttles itself to uselessness after seconds under load despite three noisy fans.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  I used a dell xps with ubuntu/gnome for years that used to get me 7-10 hours of battery life as long as I turned wifi off and was working in sublime text. This was more than I got on windows, and more than my macbook got at the time Linux is great Not sure why this is getting downvoted
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Don't blame Linux developers for the behavior of OEMs and your choice of hardware.
  - ranguna 4y ago
    So now it's my hardware's fault that my battery is better on Windows than on Linux? Come on... That's like saying: this piece of software is great but only under very specific conditions, everything else is non standard and you can't complain.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      > is my hardware's fault that my battery is better on Windows than on Linux? If the OEM provides spec/drivers/assistance to microsoft and not to anybody else, yes, it's their fault. Even more so if collaboration is done only under NDA. And it's been happening for decades. (Pretty sad that nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff) Also, no need for the snark. > everything else is non standard and you can't complain. No, you can first get a correct understanding and then complain to who is really responsible. Again, no need for the snark.
      - ranguna 4y ago
        Specs for Microsoft? You do know there are open and closed source drivers on Linux, right? OEMs develop stuff for Linux as well, it's just that they don't have a lot of incentives to do it properly, since most of the user base is on another OS. So no, it's not a hardware issue, the hardware is great. It's a software, business and culture issue that companies don't have incentives to develop consumer grade software for Linux and that Linux hasn't implemented proper performance/efficiently core support, proper egpu support, seamless hibrid graphics support, etc. Because all those tend to be stuff that the general consumer wants and not things servers would use. I encourage you to explore more around what you say before disregarding other people's opinion with "nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff" when you yourself haven't even given it much thought, please. You don't need to be so snarky either.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  I can tell you that I can run Linux at ~3.5 Watts/hour ("normal" workflow - chiefly on documents) on my laptop: you should check what is draining your battery, because the issue on efficiency you see is not necessary at all.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  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.
  - trelane 4y ago
    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.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      That's actually one of the big reasons I've held off on buying one (although the #1 reason is lack of AMD options), and am eyeing laptops from HP and Lenovo that actually advertise full Linux support (like the HP Dev One). Even if those laptops don't support Linux as well as they claim to, it seems like it'd be less of a headache to deal with than Framework with their unique dongle situation.
      - slaw 4y ago
        HP Dev One hits all checkboxes except it has very glossy screen.
        4y ago
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  I also have an Alienware and I had the same experience until I spent a lot of time tuning battery life, now I can get 7-9 hours of autonomy. If you want, I can share my setup with you to spare you the trouble.
  - alyosha-swamy 4y ago
    can you share this
- Matl 4y ago
  Is any serious money going into optimizing Linux battery life on laptops? Not that I know of. Since there's no money in Linux laptops as compared to Windows laptops, why is this surprising? I find it much more damming that Apple smokes Windows in battery life even despite Microsoft having its own line of laptops (Surface) and having the money to pour into it vs Linux.
- mrb 4y ago
  Usually it's the fault of the Linux drivers. They don't correctly configure the various integrated peripherals to draw as little current as possible: the WiFi chip, the Bluetooth chipset, the webcam, or whatever random integrated USB peripheral you find on an average laptop.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  Well people are working on it. As a random example I recently stumbled upon the "lazy RCU" patch in Linux. RCU is of course the synchronization mechanism to have mutable shared data across threads where reads don't need mutexes. Did you know that Linux's answer to "how do know this shared pointer can safely be freed" is conceptually to schedule the current thread on every single CPU? That doesn't sound power efficient and it isn't. https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220901221720.1105021-1-joel@joelfernandes.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220901221720.1105021-1-joel@jo...
- sangnoir 4y ago
  This is not inherently the fault of Linux, but the lack of drivers or decent tuning/power management default by OEMs. I get 11 hours off my $300 Linux laptop, but it's a Chromebook that's supported by Google directly, and I assume its components were preselected and the kernel is tuned up the wazoo.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  This is why I started using Pop. I saw something about better power saving and yeah, it has better defaults out of the box and I got better battery life. Now if only everything else worked flawlessly out of the box.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I’ve given up on good battery life in Linux. Any time I ask I get the “it’s easy, just do all this ridiculously complex stuff” and then it doesn’t work anyways. So now my battery is just a UPS. Which is actually kind of nice at times!
- Tsagadai 4y ago
  It's a pure resourcing issue. How many resources are allocated to improving linux desktop experience on laptops? A tiny fraction compared to Microsoft and Apple. Linux paid developers are usually focused on the server side. If next to nothing is invested in making it better then it doesn't get better.
- fortran77 4y ago
  This is why I run Windows on my laptop and use WSL when I need a Linux shell. Linux either doesn't care about or can't properly implement all the power management functions the chipset supports
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  > I get less than half the battery life on my Alienware AMD laptop under Linux than under Windows If you're on Gnome use "power saving" performance mode. Proprietary OSes throttle aggressively whereas Linux doesn't on "balanced" mode.
- Arn_Thor 4y ago
  It's fascinating to me. Linux in so many ways feels "lighter" in use than Windows, but it just eats power like nothing else
binkHN 4y ago
It's not just with Intel. Apple has 2 years on Qualcomm as well as their phones also have significantly smaller batteries compared to their Android counterparts.
spaniard89277 4y ago
It seems that we're not getting anything close to the M1. I'll stick to second-hand thinkpads for now, but I'd really like to have a thinkpad with some ARM resembling M1. We had a good shot with frame.work but it seems nobody is going to make other boards nor are keyboards really replaceable with thinkpad-like keyboards, so the swappable parts concept falls very short for now.
- dimensionc132 4y ago
- CoolCold 4y ago
  I agree that X13s looks underpowered comparing to Apple's laptops, but from my understanding of reviews - it's working machine, not a proof of concept of WoA style gimmick
  - nextos 4y ago
    Qualcomm claim they are releasing a CPU that is comparable to the M1/2 lineup next year. The X13s can run Linux fairly well right now, so it's promising. IMHO, ARM CPUs are going to eat the low and mid-end laptop market due to their energy-saving advantage.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arn_Thor 4y ago
      I'll believe it when I see it. Qualcomm is woefully behind Apple in mobile chips (so far...)
    - CoolCold 4y ago
      > The X13s can run Linux fairly well right now, so it's promising. May be, was not paying attention to it, I'm overall skeptical of Linux-on-desktop camp.
- 4y ago
troyvit 4y ago
I see it more as what's possible when you have complete control of the hardware and software stack. I'll never happily enter Apple's walled garden again but I do see the allure. You get a lot when you trade away your freedom with Apple.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thefz 4y ago
It's always the same story. Intel makes the chip, other people makes the software that runs on it. Apple makes both. On the better permormance, I have yet to see. This laptop drives 4 external displays, M1 or M2 can do the same?
- zwaps 4y ago
  Uh,yes?
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    You can connect just one external display to an m1 air. So no..
yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > Android's gotten a little better over the years By breaking background services more and more with every release. By doing less, your battery lasts longer, but for what if you want to make use of that battery? (I'm an Android user because iOS is simply not an option for tinkering, but I am sour about the breakage with every version.)
- shantara 4y ago
  To be fair, one of these vendors has also access to undocumented APIs that the others need to discover and reverse engineer to level the playing field: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsiveness-on-macos/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsi...
  - Klonoar 4y ago
    It's not quite "reverse engineering" if you just need to read the kernel code (which Apple publishes). It's undocumented, yes - but it's not like it wasn't there.
    - qwytw 4y ago
      Good luck submitting your app to the App Store if you use undocumented APIs
      - 4y ago
b112 4y ago
It's mostly systemd's fault.
- ranguna 4y ago
  Probably the gpu's fault as well, I have to restart my laptop if I want the gpu turned off or on. With it on l and barely using it, I get an extra 11-15W of power usage . Also I'm not sure how mature performance/efficiency cores are supported on Linux right now.
0xCMP 4y ago
Asahi Linux has way better battery performance than any typical x86 laptop almost entirely because of the M1 chip itself [1]. Apparently part of the genius of the chip is that they baked a large chunk of the power management logic into the chip itself. I think Linux has work it could do to be more efficient, but really we should just be mad at Intel/AMD for not doing what Apple did years ago. They never even offered an option for those willing to sacrifice compatibility. And now they're going to start looking the entire portable electronics market (little bit hyperbole, but I don't see my self buying any new computer that isn't an M1 something for a long time especially as Asahi Linux is making such good progress and I can use Linux on whatever Apple releases in the future). [1]: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20&t=G4ewghwb3AUT-n-WCg1bTQ https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
qwytw 4y ago
> with as good or better performance 12700H has comparable single core performance and significantly faster multi core performance than M1. It's seem to be about at the same level as M1 Pro/Ultra just with much poorer energy efficiency.
seanp2k2 4y ago
AMD has them beat on battery life too, Intel just keeps pushing up TDP to try to get perf back even though their node size is bigger and their fab tech is behind. It looks good on paper to call this a "14-core laptop" too but really it's more like an 8-core with a 6-core co-processor. I like this in general, but $2400 + $100 shipping for an i7-12700H / 32GB DDR5 / 2TB 980 Pro / non-OLED display is a bit high. I'm personally waiting for this Vivobook Pro 16x to drop later this year: https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-pro-16x-oled-m7601-amd-ryzen-6000-series/ https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-... - Ryzen 9 6900HX (8-core / 4.9Ghz) - RTX 3060 / 6GB GDDR6 - Choice between 4K/60 OLED or 3200x2000/120 OLED, both with >=550nits and TUV cert - 2x NVMe slots so 8TB max SSD? - 90whr battery - The current model is $1650 / free shipping on Amazon so expected pricing is the same as it replaces that model (current: M7600RE-XB99, new: M7601) For $2400 you can get a ProArt Studiobook H5600QR-XB99 with Ryzen 9 5900HX | 64GB | 2TB | RTX 3070 or for $2200 (on sale right now) a Razer Blade 14 with 6900HX |RTX 3070 Ti| 14" QHD 165Hz | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB, so those are what this is competing with, and those others come with Windows licenses too (it looks like the Vivobook MIGHT be available without an OS, but no word on what configurations offer that). - 16" 3.2K 120 Hz OLED
- noveltyaccount 4y ago
  Wait a couple months longer and you may be able to buy one with a Zen4 chip, on 5nm process (same as M1).
numpad0 4y ago
> with as good or better performance I don’t know, just the other day I saw someone warning against falling for M1/M2 for StableDiffusion inference(people buy new computers to run SD apparently!), claiming that same code take two orders of magnitude longer on M1/M2 against a 3080. So maybe an M1/M2 Air isn’t faster than Intel(+NVIDIA) machine at TDP, maybe it’s magnificent that it’s only 100 times slower than a proper desktop, maybe it is still a lightweight ARM laptop, just (salivatingly) nice ones.
- danielheath 4y ago
  A 3080 costs nearly as much (on its own) as an M2 air. Not surprising that SD is slower without a discrete GPU.
nine_k 4y ago
Likely not the x86 chip lineup. The problem is also in the software. Apple tightly controls both software and hardware, and major Apple-provided software, such as Safari, is specifically optimized. Run Firefox on an M1, and see how much more battery it eats with the same tabs open. Hence an Apple-only laptop has a spectacular battery life, which is reported. With real-world non-Apple software it could be a bit different, even though M1 CPU is really more energy-efficient than a mobile x86 CPU. This is not touching the GPU anyway.

shrubble 4y ago

My Dell Latitude 7490, 16GB DDR4 with i7-8650U, 60Wh battery, gets very good battery life under Devuan, 7 hours+ I think with my usage. My belief is that it varies between Linux distributions a great deal.

slashdev 4y ago

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.

jchw 4y ago
Does that laptop support Linux? If not, I'd expect a key reason is simple; it likely is not using all of the power saving functionality supported by the laptop. This might include things like S0ix, throttling, proper sleep states, etc. There's a lot of factors going in, and I think by and large it is not actually an endemic issue with Linux itself. Consider for example that x86 Chromebooks have no issue fully exploiting modern x86 power saving features and getting good battery life.
- eloff 4y ago
  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.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    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.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      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.
  - jchw 4y ago
    The thing is, there aren't really that many laptops designed to run Linux. Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later. Sure, this feels like a cop-out and is not really of much aid to anybody, but it's only fair to note. Generally, I do not have dramatically worse battery life on Linux vs Windows, but I also did stop buying laptops with NVIDIA graphics. (Irrespective of Linux, these have given me tons of trouble. Even on Windows, external displays were a painful experience on my Thinkpad P52 no matter what mux settings were set in firmware. I guess it works out OK since NVIDIA on Linux is far from ideal at the moment.)
    - pxc 4y ago
      > Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later. System76 does get complete hardware specs from the chipset manufacturer, though, and their cooperation in porting an open-source firmware to the motherboard. They run Coreboot instead of the proprietary OEM UEFIs, and this has let them achieve some nice things in power management (including MacBook-like instant on from sleep and hibernation, for example) on some models. I'm still excited for the first systems where they get to do the physical design as well, but their firmware work on their rebadged laptops is substantial and relevant to the power efficiency issue.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Run powertop as root and go to the analysis tab https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/powertop https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/powertop
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Suppose I want to reverse engineer all of my laptop's power saving features and write drivers for them or whatever it is that Linux needs to work properly. How do I begin? I managed to get as far as dumping ACPI DSDT but I couldn't figure out where to go from there. I got all the extra USB features working. It should be possible to support everything else too. If I learn this I'll add support for all the laptops I buy in the future too.
jeroenhd 4y ago
For me it's the exact opposite: I can't get the Linux battery life on Windows without turning Windows down into a stutterfest. Windows is also noisy as hell. It all comes down to driver support. If you manufacturer doesn't have proper drivers, your experience will suck. It says a lot about Lenovo that open source Linux drivers work better than their proprietary ones, but that probably comes with the territory if you combine Intel and Nvidia.
jcims 4y ago
This used to be the other way around. I worked for a laptop company (Winbook!) in the 90s and Windows 3.x and IIRC even (early) Windows 95 were largely oblivious to power management features. These laptops had no fan and the bottom of the case acted as a heatsink. (We would regularly get calls from customers complaining about damage to their tables/desks). One thing I noticed almost immediately when running linux is that when I was just farting around learning the OS, the laptop would get stone cold. But when I did something large, like compile a kernel, while the laptop was actually on my lap I could physically feel the heat from the CPU start to leak through the case.
dimensionc132 4y ago
bipson 4y ago
Alienware? I suspect you have a dedicated graphics card? Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough". I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Probably an Optimus setup on the Windows side. It basically powers down the graphics card most of the time and switches to the lighter Intel graphics instead. Linux support for Optimus is poor and usually you end up having to choose either good battery life or good gaming performance.
  - eloff 4y ago
    This is likely it as the AMD CPU has a built-in low power Radeon GPU, and there's a monster Nvidia card for gaming. Do you know how I can check if the discrete card is being used / drawing power?
    - pxc 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure Intel `powertop` can tell you, but if it can't tell you directly you can measure the difference in power consumption depending on whether the dGPU is enabled in the BIOS.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      I don't know about AMD but nvidia cards have a management interface that provides useful data like temperatures, load and wattage. AMD should have something similar. I wrote a script to query that data and output it in a format compatible with i3status. In case you'd like to see how it works: https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.local/bin/nvidia-smi.py https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.loca... Please share the changes if you figure out an AMD solution. I'm curious.
martin1975 4y ago
Why do you run Linux on Alienware hardware?
- eloff 4y ago
  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.)
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  In my case at least: because it was hard to find non-gamer laptops with fast CPUs. Turned out to be a moot point anyway because the thing throttles itself to uselessness after seconds under load despite three noisy fans.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I used a dell xps with ubuntu/gnome for years that used to get me 7-10 hours of battery life as long as I turned wifi off and was working in sublime text. This was more than I got on windows, and more than my macbook got at the time Linux is great Not sure why this is getting downvoted
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
goodpoint 4y ago
Don't blame Linux developers for the behavior of OEMs and your choice of hardware.
- ranguna 4y ago
  So now it's my hardware's fault that my battery is better on Windows than on Linux? Come on... That's like saying: this piece of software is great but only under very specific conditions, everything else is non standard and you can't complain.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > is my hardware's fault that my battery is better on Windows than on Linux? If the OEM provides spec/drivers/assistance to microsoft and not to anybody else, yes, it's their fault. Even more so if collaboration is done only under NDA. And it's been happening for decades. (Pretty sad that nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff) Also, no need for the snark. > everything else is non standard and you can't complain. No, you can first get a correct understanding and then complain to who is really responsible. Again, no need for the snark.
    - ranguna 4y ago
      Specs for Microsoft? You do know there are open and closed source drivers on Linux, right? OEMs develop stuff for Linux as well, it's just that they don't have a lot of incentives to do it properly, since most of the user base is on another OS. So no, it's not a hardware issue, the hardware is great. It's a software, business and culture issue that companies don't have incentives to develop consumer grade software for Linux and that Linux hasn't implemented proper performance/efficiently core support, proper egpu support, seamless hibrid graphics support, etc. Because all those tend to be stuff that the general consumer wants and not things servers would use. I encourage you to explore more around what you say before disregarding other people's opinion with "nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff" when you yourself haven't even given it much thought, please. You don't need to be so snarky either.
mdp2021 4y ago
I can tell you that I can run Linux at ~3.5 Watts/hour ("normal" workflow - chiefly on documents) on my laptop: you should check what is draining your battery, because the issue on efficiency you see is not necessary at all.
seabrookmx 4y ago
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.
- trelane 4y ago
  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.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    That's actually one of the big reasons I've held off on buying one (although the #1 reason is lack of AMD options), and am eyeing laptops from HP and Lenovo that actually advertise full Linux support (like the HP Dev One). Even if those laptops don't support Linux as well as they claim to, it seems like it'd be less of a headache to deal with than Framework with their unique dongle situation.
    - slaw 4y ago
      HP Dev One hits all checkboxes except it has very glossy screen.
      - 4y ago
sudosysgen 4y ago
I also have an Alienware and I had the same experience until I spent a lot of time tuning battery life, now I can get 7-9 hours of autonomy. If you want, I can share my setup with you to spare you the trouble.
- alyosha-swamy 4y ago
  can you share this
Matl 4y ago
Is any serious money going into optimizing Linux battery life on laptops? Not that I know of. Since there's no money in Linux laptops as compared to Windows laptops, why is this surprising? I find it much more damming that Apple smokes Windows in battery life even despite Microsoft having its own line of laptops (Surface) and having the money to pour into it vs Linux.
mrb 4y ago
Usually it's the fault of the Linux drivers. They don't correctly configure the various integrated peripherals to draw as little current as possible: the WiFi chip, the Bluetooth chipset, the webcam, or whatever random integrated USB peripheral you find on an average laptop.
kccqzy 4y ago
Well people are working on it. As a random example I recently stumbled upon the "lazy RCU" patch in Linux. RCU is of course the synchronization mechanism to have mutable shared data across threads where reads don't need mutexes. Did you know that Linux's answer to "how do know this shared pointer can safely be freed" is conceptually to schedule the current thread on every single CPU? That doesn't sound power efficient and it isn't. https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220901221720.1105021-1-joel@joelfernandes.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220901221720.1105021-1-joel@jo...
sangnoir 4y ago
This is not inherently the fault of Linux, but the lack of drivers or decent tuning/power management default by OEMs. I get 11 hours off my $300 Linux laptop, but it's a Chromebook that's supported by Google directly, and I assume its components were preselected and the kernel is tuned up the wazoo.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
This is why I started using Pop. I saw something about better power saving and yeah, it has better defaults out of the box and I got better battery life. Now if only everything else worked flawlessly out of the box.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I’ve given up on good battery life in Linux. Any time I ask I get the “it’s easy, just do all this ridiculously complex stuff” and then it doesn’t work anyways. So now my battery is just a UPS. Which is actually kind of nice at times!
Tsagadai 4y ago
It's a pure resourcing issue. How many resources are allocated to improving linux desktop experience on laptops? A tiny fraction compared to Microsoft and Apple. Linux paid developers are usually focused on the server side. If next to nothing is invested in making it better then it doesn't get better.
fortran77 4y ago
This is why I run Windows on my laptop and use WSL when I need a Linux shell. Linux either doesn't care about or can't properly implement all the power management functions the chipset supports
Mikeb85 4y ago
> I get less than half the battery life on my Alienware AMD laptop under Linux than under Windows If you're on Gnome use "power saving" performance mode. Proprietary OSes throttle aggressively whereas Linux doesn't on "balanced" mode.
Arn_Thor 4y ago
It's fascinating to me. Linux in so many ways feels "lighter" in use than Windows, but it just eats power like nothing else

binkHN 4y ago

It's not just with Intel. Apple has 2 years on Qualcomm as well as their phones also have significantly smaller batteries compared to their Android counterparts.

spaniard89277 4y ago

It seems that we're not getting anything close to the M1. I'll stick to second-hand thinkpads for now, but I'd really like to have a thinkpad with some ARM resembling M1. We had a good shot with frame.work but it seems nobody is going to make other boards nor are keyboards really replaceable with thinkpad-like keyboards, so the swappable parts concept falls very short for now.

dimensionc132 4y ago
CoolCold 4y ago
I agree that X13s looks underpowered comparing to Apple's laptops, but from my understanding of reviews - it's working machine, not a proof of concept of WoA style gimmick
- nextos 4y ago
  Qualcomm claim they are releasing a CPU that is comparable to the M1/2 lineup next year. The X13s can run Linux fairly well right now, so it's promising. IMHO, ARM CPUs are going to eat the low and mid-end laptop market due to their energy-saving advantage.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arn_Thor 4y ago
    I'll believe it when I see it. Qualcomm is woefully behind Apple in mobile chips (so far...)
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    > The X13s can run Linux fairly well right now, so it's promising. May be, was not paying attention to it, I'm overall skeptical of Linux-on-desktop camp.
4y ago

troyvit 4y ago

I see it more as what's possible when you have complete control of the hardware and software stack. I'll never happily enter Apple's walled garden again but I do see the allure. You get a lot when you trade away your freedom with Apple.

deleted 4y ago

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thefz 4y ago

It's always the same story. Intel makes the chip, other people makes the software that runs on it. Apple makes both. On the better permormance, I have yet to see. This laptop drives 4 external displays, M1 or M2 can do the same?

zwaps 4y ago
Uh,yes?
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  You can connect just one external display to an m1 air. So no..

yamtaddle 4y ago

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.

lucb1e 4y ago
> Android's gotten a little better over the years By breaking background services more and more with every release. By doing less, your battery lasts longer, but for what if you want to make use of that battery? (I'm an Android user because iOS is simply not an option for tinkering, but I am sour about the breakage with every version.)
shantara 4y ago
To be fair, one of these vendors has also access to undocumented APIs that the others need to discover and reverse engineer to level the playing field: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsiveness-on-macos/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsi...
- Klonoar 4y ago
  It's not quite "reverse engineering" if you just need to read the kernel code (which Apple publishes). It's undocumented, yes - but it's not like it wasn't there.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    Good luck submitting your app to the App Store if you use undocumented APIs
    - 4y ago

b112 4y ago

It's mostly systemd's fault.

ranguna 4y ago
Probably the gpu's fault as well, I have to restart my laptop if I want the gpu turned off or on. With it on l and barely using it, I get an extra 11-15W of power usage . Also I'm not sure how mature performance/efficiency cores are supported on Linux right now.

0xCMP 4y ago

Asahi Linux has way better battery performance than any typical x86 laptop almost entirely because of the M1 chip itself [1]. Apparently part of the genius of the chip is that they baked a large chunk of the power management logic into the chip itself. I think Linux has work it could do to be more efficient, but really we should just be mad at Intel/AMD for not doing what Apple did years ago. They never even offered an option for those willing to sacrifice compatibility. And now they're going to start looking the entire portable electronics market (little bit hyperbole, but I don't see my self buying any new computer that isn't an M1 something for a long time especially as Asahi Linux is making such good progress and I can use Linux on whatever Apple releases in the future). [1]: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20&t=G4ewghwb3AUT-n-WCg1bTQ https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20...

deleted 4y ago
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qwytw 4y ago

> with as good or better performance 12700H has comparable single core performance and significantly faster multi core performance than M1. It's seem to be about at the same level as M1 Pro/Ultra just with much poorer energy efficiency.

seanp2k2 4y ago

AMD has them beat on battery life too, Intel just keeps pushing up TDP to try to get perf back even though their node size is bigger and their fab tech is behind. It looks good on paper to call this a "14-core laptop" too but really it's more like an 8-core with a 6-core co-processor. I like this in general, but $2400 + $100 shipping for an i7-12700H / 32GB DDR5 / 2TB 980 Pro / non-OLED display is a bit high. I'm personally waiting for this Vivobook Pro 16x to drop later this year: https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-pro-16x-oled-m7601-amd-ryzen-6000-series/ https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-... - Ryzen 9 6900HX (8-core / 4.9Ghz) - RTX 3060 / 6GB GDDR6 - Choice between 4K/60 OLED or 3200x2000/120 OLED, both with >=550nits and TUV cert - 2x NVMe slots so 8TB max SSD? - 90whr battery - The current model is $1650 / free shipping on Amazon so expected pricing is the same as it replaces that model (current: M7600RE-XB99, new: M7601) For $2400 you can get a ProArt Studiobook H5600QR-XB99 with Ryzen 9 5900HX | 64GB | 2TB | RTX 3070 or for $2200 (on sale right now) a Razer Blade 14 with 6900HX |RTX 3070 Ti| 14" QHD 165Hz | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB, so those are what this is competing with, and those others come with Windows licenses too (it looks like the Vivobook MIGHT be available without an OS, but no word on what configurations offer that). - 16" 3.2K 120 Hz OLED

noveltyaccount 4y ago
Wait a couple months longer and you may be able to buy one with a Zen4 chip, on 5nm process (same as M1).

numpad0 4y ago

> with as good or better performance I don’t know, just the other day I saw someone warning against falling for M1/M2 for StableDiffusion inference(people buy new computers to run SD apparently!), claiming that same code take two orders of magnitude longer on M1/M2 against a 3080. So maybe an M1/M2 Air isn’t faster than Intel(+NVIDIA) machine at TDP, maybe it’s magnificent that it’s only 100 times slower than a proper desktop, maybe it is still a lightweight ARM laptop, just (salivatingly) nice ones.

danielheath 4y ago
A 3080 costs nearly as much (on its own) as an M2 air. Not surprising that SD is slower without a discrete GPU.

nine_k 4y ago

Likely not the x86 chip lineup. The problem is also in the software. Apple tightly controls both software and hardware, and major Apple-provided software, such as Safari, is specifically optimized. Run Firefox on an M1, and see how much more battery it eats with the same tabs open. Hence an Apple-only laptop has a spectacular battery life, which is reported. With real-world non-Apple software it could be a bit different, even though M1 CPU is really more energy-efficient than a mobile x86 CPU. This is not touching the GPU anyway.