5 ms·

I have to admit, I tried and failed to switch away from Apple. I bought a Linux Laptop - an System 76. I was surprised at how terrible the battery management of

I have to admit, I tried and failed to switch away from Apple. I bought a Linux Laptop - an System 76. I was surprised at how terrible the battery management of linux was compared with my mac. And that particular issue broke me.

qumpis 4y ago
It requires lots of manual control but from my experience I can match or exceed battery life in comparison to running windows, with some tweaking. Out of the box it was terrible as well.
- acc_297 4y ago
  What did you adjust?
  - prophesi 4y ago
    This is for the Framework laptop and not a System76 machine, but going through this lets my laptop last an entire day doing Android dev. https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuning/6665 https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...
    - snapplebobapple 4y ago
      Similar experience over here on one of the earlier 11th gen models and recently on a new 12th gen model as well (build quality feels a lot improved vs the early stuff too, fyi). People are still right to call BS on having to run any of this to get decent battery performance but it is possible to get if you jump through a few hoops. Next step for distros should really be sane defaults for this stuff and/or an option to tell the installer it's going on a laptop/non workstation desktop so that it gets sane defaults for the laptop based on efficiency per watt rather then the sane defaults for a server/workstation (max performance).
      - prophesi 4y ago
        Yep, and another frustration with Fedora in particular are the defaults for DNF. I don't get why the distro doesn't set `/etc/dnf/dnf.conf` with `max_parallel_downloads=10` and `fastestmirror=True`. sudo dnf update is so much faster with that (though you still need to keep away from the GNOME software app).
        snapplebobapple 4y ago
        I havent really ised redhat based distros since redhat 5.4....If you want to go for a walk on the wild side try cachyos. It makes arch easy and has some nice defaults (atleast for kde, not sure about gnome, as i went kde them recently hyprland). It also has v3 and some v4 architecture compiled packages which are more performant on newer cpus. The pacman defaults are reasonable as well regarding parallel downloads.
      - kitsunesoba 4y ago
        I can understand distributions not having optimal settings for every laptop under the sun, but it seems like a no-brainer to at least create a repository of power config profiles for different models that users can submit to, eventually creating a decent library that could then be integrated into the settings app or and first run wizard.
        _piif 4y ago
        Whilst not strictly for power settings, NixOS has a repository where users can contribute general optimized settings for their hardware. https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
        prophesi 4y ago
        Not sure why this is downvoted, that's awesome on NixOS's part.
    - MegaDeKay 4y ago
      Has Framework made progress on battery drain while sleeping? I'm interesting in getting one but that sticks out as a big problem for me.
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    This wiki article covers a lot of the big things: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw... But generally powertop is enough for a significant boost. For certain manufacturers (ASUS is a good example), you want to use their vendor specific tools to manage CPU/GPU powerbands.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    It's not that simple. Two of my last five laptops were macs, three linux boxes, if you consider corporate laptops as "mine". One of the three linux laptops just worked beautifully (wrt. battery and other driver issues), one didn't at all, and one worked poorly until I installed some software that shouldn't matter for battery lifetime, and since then it's had excellent battery management. There was a long list of dependencies, so I suspect that the software I installed depended on a package that solved whatever the problem was. You may chance to buy hardware where someone really has tested and fixed linux. Or you may get something else. FYI: The two good ones are some Huawei thing that weighs 1.3kg and a GPD P2 Max, a tiny toy, really portable, https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax
- justinzollars 4y ago
  I'd love if you wrote a blog post. I didn't know where to start (but I guess we have ChatGPT now)
- garciasn 4y ago
  And this continues to be why Linux suffers with the mass market. I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to manage. Every time I go back, it just isn’t catching up to the mainstream OSs’ ability to manage without “futzing”. My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code. Nothing can match that right now, but I am still hopeful for a Linux future.
  - bityard 4y ago
    I get irrationally angry when people imply that Mac and Linux are somehow similar, or interchangeable. They are not! Not even close! I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are surprised to find that experience is vastly different. Linux is a great choice for people who want the highest degree of control and freedom over how they interact with their computer. The trade-off is that sometimes you have to futz with it or report bugs. If you view your computer strictly as a tool to let you get other things done, then you want Mac. All of the OS and UX decisions have been made for you and you get what you get, but you (should) never have to tinker with the system itself.
    - garciasn 4y ago
      Fair enough; if you’re talking about random machines Linux light be installed on. But! I believe System76 should ship their laptops with tools and/or settings and/or configs for other mainline distributions that maximize the experience on their hardware while allowing for the inherent customization Linux-based distributions. I’d argue Sys76 is far closer to Apple than just installing Linux on a random machine.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      I disagree that it’s a trade-off. Linux could match Apple’s out of the box battery performance. It’s just that nobody seems to care about Linux’s “out of the box” default configuration because, well, the user can futz with it! Things are slowly getting better though. But we still don’t have that distribution where things are already futzed for you and everything runs as well as it can.
- hollander 4y ago
  But if ou bought a Linux laptop, it should come preconfigured with the optimal settings, with at least one or two distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, plus the settings described in a manual.
davidy123 4y ago
I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in the last few years.
- deergomoo 4y ago
  Raw battery life aside, I think one big advantage macOS still has is that its power management isn't modal. There is a low power mode like iOS if you really want to eek out as much runtime as possible, but I've never once hit a need to use it. Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on battery, you get full performance when you need it, and high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose a power/performance profile feels incredibly archaic to me, though I appreciate that some folks may want that level of manual control.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Plugged-in performance while unplugged without torpedoing battery life is what is really special about M-series laptops for me. It’s such a stark contrast with my ThinkPad which becomes noticeably more sluggish the moment it’s untethered in “balanced” mode and eating through battery like candy with “Performance”.
  - davidy123 4y ago
    I see your point, but I just leave it on "balanced" unless the battery is critically low. Fan very rarely comes on, everything runs quickly, and I get decent battery life. This was NOT, btw, my experience with Intel laptops.
- tssva 4y ago
  I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. When I 1st got it battery life was atrocious under Linux. Kernel release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just horrible even with TLP installed. The battery life under Windows is about double what I get when running Linux. It isn't the only but is the main reason I run Windows and not Linux as my main os on it.
outside1234 4y ago
Which is really weird because they clearly CAN do it for mobile phones with Android, so why hasn’t that trickled down to laptops?
acomjean 4y ago
i switched. I have the previous gen AMD powered (Ryzen 5700U) system 76 and the battery life is decent (6-7 hours). I have one 4 year old system 76 notebook with the NVIDIA gpu and that thing when running the 3d graphics mode is terrible (<3 hours), but its a gaming laptop and a beast (well 4 years ago it was..). I have 2.5 TB of storage, huge memory. Its more of a portable desktop than a notebook. I really like software development on Linux much better than mac. There are a few things I miss from the apple side, but generally its been great.
- justinzollars 4y ago
  OP here. Same. I was using NVIDIA graphics and it was very very bad.
newsclues 4y ago
Linux Workstation with a Mac laptop seems to best the best of both worlds. I even have a windows box for gaming. I pick the right tool for the job and try not to apply ideology to tool choice.
drivebyops 4y ago
There simply isn’t a proper contender to Apple. And with Apple silicon, it’s a done deal for the next decade at least. Apart from hardware, you need a company that is willing to take Linux from the ground up and create a macOS type OS. Not simply make your own distribution and DE and call it a day. Chromebook was close, but they had bad execution and wrong ideas.
- runjake 4y ago
  Linux is a kernel. Making your own distribution and DE is how you create a Linux-based macOS. I’d say System 76 is doing that but their execution has stumbled for the past year or so. They are working on their own Rust-based DE, to some level of success. I hope they get back on track.
  - NexRebular 4y ago
    No need for linux. There's the helloSystem[1], a FreeBSD-based macOS clone... [1] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
  - akho 4y ago
    How do I get full-disk encryption on Linux without having to type a password twice on boot? This is not a surface-level issue you can solve at distribution / DE level, and it’s not the only one. A good pre-installed environment of current tools would be nice, of course.
drewg123 4y ago
For desktop, I had exactly the opposite experience in ~2006. I had a whitebox *nix box that had a catastrophic failure and I needed to be up and running quickly. I was working 12+ hours a day, had a new baby, and I didn't have time to install / maintain a *nix box. So I bought an iMac to use as a desktop. What a mistake. Everything that was easy in *nix was a massive PITA in MacOS. I'm talking about things like basic desktop customization (focus follows mouse, customized mouse buttons + keyboard hotkeys combos to move/iconify/resize windows, etc). I ended up using open source X11 based utils for most things but my web browser & mail because as long as I stayed within X11, I could satisfy my 20+ year old muscle memory with focus-follows-mouse and my hotkeys. However, every now and then I'd blindly start typing and the focus was still on my mail client or browser and random things would happen (adding bookmarks, deleting emails, etc) After a year I never managed to unlearn ffm & my hotkeys, so I gave up, gave the iMac to my then in-laws, and built a new whitebox. I realize there are extensions for ffm, but ffm on MacOS is a crapshoot in my experience and I was never able to find an extension that I like. Similarly, at the time, I could not find any extension that satisfied my muscle-memory window management hotkey/mouse button combos. I don't mind click to focus so much on a laptop, but I can't stand it on a desktop. Over the years I have settled on *nix on a desktop and MacOS on a laptop..
nvarsj 4y ago
I feel like this comment has short memory. Battery life on intel macbooks was terrible ime. Frequently it would drain completely while the lid was closed overnight. Always had to keep it plugged in. Of course Apple silicon is fantastic and nothing beats it now. On the Linux side, I've had great luck with AMD + recent kernels. I get around 6 hours now on my Thinkpad X13 gen 2 which is good enough for me.

qumpis 4y ago

It requires lots of manual control but from my experience I can match or exceed battery life in comparison to running windows, with some tweaking. Out of the box it was terrible as well.

acc_297 4y ago
What did you adjust?
- prophesi 4y ago
  This is for the Framework laptop and not a System76 machine, but going through this lets my laptop last an entire day doing Android dev. https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuning/6665 https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...
  - snapplebobapple 4y ago
    Similar experience over here on one of the earlier 11th gen models and recently on a new 12th gen model as well (build quality feels a lot improved vs the early stuff too, fyi). People are still right to call BS on having to run any of this to get decent battery performance but it is possible to get if you jump through a few hoops. Next step for distros should really be sane defaults for this stuff and/or an option to tell the installer it's going on a laptop/non workstation desktop so that it gets sane defaults for the laptop based on efficiency per watt rather then the sane defaults for a server/workstation (max performance).
    - prophesi 4y ago
      Yep, and another frustration with Fedora in particular are the defaults for DNF. I don't get why the distro doesn't set `/etc/dnf/dnf.conf` with `max_parallel_downloads=10` and `fastestmirror=True`. sudo dnf update is so much faster with that (though you still need to keep away from the GNOME software app).
      - snapplebobapple 4y ago
        I havent really ised redhat based distros since redhat 5.4....If you want to go for a walk on the wild side try cachyos. It makes arch easy and has some nice defaults (atleast for kde, not sure about gnome, as i went kde them recently hyprland). It also has v3 and some v4 architecture compiled packages which are more performant on newer cpus. The pacman defaults are reasonable as well regarding parallel downloads.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      I can understand distributions not having optimal settings for every laptop under the sun, but it seems like a no-brainer to at least create a repository of power config profiles for different models that users can submit to, eventually creating a decent library that could then be integrated into the settings app or and first run wizard.
      - _piif 4y ago
        Whilst not strictly for power settings, NixOS has a repository where users can contribute general optimized settings for their hardware. https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
        prophesi 4y ago
        Not sure why this is downvoted, that's awesome on NixOS's part.
  - MegaDeKay 4y ago
    Has Framework made progress on battery drain while sleeping? I'm interesting in getting one but that sticks out as a big problem for me.
- deaddodo 4y ago
  This wiki article covers a lot of the big things: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw... But generally powertop is enough for a significant boost. For certain manufacturers (ASUS is a good example), you want to use their vendor specific tools to manage CPU/GPU powerbands.
- Arnt 4y ago
  It's not that simple. Two of my last five laptops were macs, three linux boxes, if you consider corporate laptops as "mine". One of the three linux laptops just worked beautifully (wrt. battery and other driver issues), one didn't at all, and one worked poorly until I installed some software that shouldn't matter for battery lifetime, and since then it's had excellent battery management. There was a long list of dependencies, so I suspect that the software I installed depended on a package that solved whatever the problem was. You may chance to buy hardware where someone really has tested and fixed linux. Or you may get something else. FYI: The two good ones are some Huawei thing that weighs 1.3kg and a GPD P2 Max, a tiny toy, really portable, https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax
justinzollars 4y ago
I'd love if you wrote a blog post. I didn't know where to start (but I guess we have ChatGPT now)
garciasn 4y ago
And this continues to be why Linux suffers with the mass market. I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to manage. Every time I go back, it just isn’t catching up to the mainstream OSs’ ability to manage without “futzing”. My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code. Nothing can match that right now, but I am still hopeful for a Linux future.
- bityard 4y ago
  I get irrationally angry when people imply that Mac and Linux are somehow similar, or interchangeable. They are not! Not even close! I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are surprised to find that experience is vastly different. Linux is a great choice for people who want the highest degree of control and freedom over how they interact with their computer. The trade-off is that sometimes you have to futz with it or report bugs. If you view your computer strictly as a tool to let you get other things done, then you want Mac. All of the OS and UX decisions have been made for you and you get what you get, but you (should) never have to tinker with the system itself.
  - garciasn 4y ago
    Fair enough; if you’re talking about random machines Linux light be installed on. But! I believe System76 should ship their laptops with tools and/or settings and/or configs for other mainline distributions that maximize the experience on their hardware while allowing for the inherent customization Linux-based distributions. I’d argue Sys76 is far closer to Apple than just installing Linux on a random machine.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    I disagree that it’s a trade-off. Linux could match Apple’s out of the box battery performance. It’s just that nobody seems to care about Linux’s “out of the box” default configuration because, well, the user can futz with it! Things are slowly getting better though. But we still don’t have that distribution where things are already futzed for you and everything runs as well as it can.
hollander 4y ago
But if ou bought a Linux laptop, it should come preconfigured with the optimal settings, with at least one or two distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, plus the settings described in a manual.

davidy123 4y ago

I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in the last few years.

deergomoo 4y ago
Raw battery life aside, I think one big advantage macOS still has is that its power management isn't modal. There is a low power mode like iOS if you really want to eek out as much runtime as possible, but I've never once hit a need to use it. Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on battery, you get full performance when you need it, and high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose a power/performance profile feels incredibly archaic to me, though I appreciate that some folks may want that level of manual control.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Plugged-in performance while unplugged without torpedoing battery life is what is really special about M-series laptops for me. It’s such a stark contrast with my ThinkPad which becomes noticeably more sluggish the moment it’s untethered in “balanced” mode and eating through battery like candy with “Performance”.
- davidy123 4y ago
  I see your point, but I just leave it on "balanced" unless the battery is critically low. Fan very rarely comes on, everything runs quickly, and I get decent battery life. This was NOT, btw, my experience with Intel laptops.
tssva 4y ago
I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. When I 1st got it battery life was atrocious under Linux. Kernel release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just horrible even with TLP installed. The battery life under Windows is about double what I get when running Linux. It isn't the only but is the main reason I run Windows and not Linux as my main os on it.

outside1234 4y ago

Which is really weird because they clearly CAN do it for mobile phones with Android, so why hasn’t that trickled down to laptops?

acomjean 4y ago

i switched. I have the previous gen AMD powered (Ryzen 5700U) system 76 and the battery life is decent (6-7 hours). I have one 4 year old system 76 notebook with the NVIDIA gpu and that thing when running the 3d graphics mode is terrible (<3 hours), but its a gaming laptop and a beast (well 4 years ago it was..). I have 2.5 TB of storage, huge memory. Its more of a portable desktop than a notebook. I really like software development on Linux much better than mac. There are a few things I miss from the apple side, but generally its been great.

justinzollars 4y ago
OP here. Same. I was using NVIDIA graphics and it was very very bad.

newsclues 4y ago

Linux Workstation with a Mac laptop seems to best the best of both worlds. I even have a windows box for gaming. I pick the right tool for the job and try not to apply ideology to tool choice.

drivebyops 4y ago

There simply isn’t a proper contender to Apple. And with Apple silicon, it’s a done deal for the next decade at least. Apart from hardware, you need a company that is willing to take Linux from the ground up and create a macOS type OS. Not simply make your own distribution and DE and call it a day. Chromebook was close, but they had bad execution and wrong ideas.

runjake 4y ago
Linux is a kernel. Making your own distribution and DE is how you create a Linux-based macOS. I’d say System 76 is doing that but their execution has stumbled for the past year or so. They are working on their own Rust-based DE, to some level of success. I hope they get back on track.
- NexRebular 4y ago
  No need for linux. There's the helloSystem[1], a FreeBSD-based macOS clone... [1] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
- akho 4y ago
  How do I get full-disk encryption on Linux without having to type a password twice on boot? This is not a surface-level issue you can solve at distribution / DE level, and it’s not the only one. A good pre-installed environment of current tools would be nice, of course.

drewg123 4y ago

For desktop, I had exactly the opposite experience in ~2006. I had a whitebox *nix box that had a catastrophic failure and I needed to be up and running quickly. I was working 12+ hours a day, had a new baby, and I didn't have time to install / maintain a *nix box. So I bought an iMac to use as a desktop. What a mistake. Everything that was easy in *nix was a massive PITA in MacOS. I'm talking about things like basic desktop customization (focus follows mouse, customized mouse buttons + keyboard hotkeys combos to move/iconify/resize windows, etc). I ended up using open source X11 based utils for most things but my web browser & mail because as long as I stayed within X11, I could satisfy my 20+ year old muscle memory with focus-follows-mouse and my hotkeys. However, every now and then I'd blindly start typing and the focus was still on my mail client or browser and random things would happen (adding bookmarks, deleting emails, etc) After a year I never managed to unlearn ffm & my hotkeys, so I gave up, gave the iMac to my then in-laws, and built a new whitebox. I realize there are extensions for ffm, but ffm on MacOS is a crapshoot in my experience and I was never able to find an extension that I like. Similarly, at the time, I could not find any extension that satisfied my muscle-memory window management hotkey/mouse button combos. I don't mind click to focus so much on a laptop, but I can't stand it on a desktop. Over the years I have settled on *nix on a desktop and MacOS on a laptop..

nvarsj 4y ago

I feel like this comment has short memory. Battery life on intel macbooks was terrible ime. Frequently it would drain completely while the lid was closed overnight. Always had to keep it plugged in. Of course Apple silicon is fantastic and nothing beats it now. On the Linux side, I've had great luck with AMD + recent kernels. I get around 6 hours now on my Thinkpad X13 gen 2 which is good enough for me.