6 ms·

Let's be fair here, Intel CPUs have terrible battery life under every OS.

by Miraste 2y ago

bee_rider 2y ago
Eh, play around with powertop a bit, things aren’t so bad in Linux.
- Miraste 2y ago
  That can get it to be okay, if you put some effort in and get lucky with the manufacturer, but it's still worse than basically anything else that's modern and supports Linux.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    On my system looking at it right now, I only see wireless consuming much power. Everything else is below 100mW. I can’t really blame x86 for the wireless power consumption (maybe Intel more generally though).
- acdha 2y ago
  Possibly, but how much time do you need to spend getting closer to the out of the box macOS experience? If it’s more than an hour or so you’re paying more to have an involuntary hobby.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    That seems sort of beside the point. The existence of not-power-hungry Linux installs indicates that there’s something Microsoft could do about the problem. For me, I like a convertible laptop which I cannot buy from Apple for any amount of money as far as I know. If I could have gotten a fully unlocked iPad I probably would have gone for that, but they don’t seem to exist. Yet, at least! Here’s hoping. It actually would be nice if Microsoft would figure out their part of the mess, because that would give people the ability to trade money for battery life.
6SixTy 2y ago
Doesn't help that there's a ton of different hardware vendors that likely have their own ACPI bugs, effectively making good power management impossible.
papichulo2023 2y ago
No really, I have a Chromebook with a 1215u and de battery life is pretty decent, in the other hand my 1255u laptop with windows not so much...
- rty32 2y ago
  I think Chromebook throttle the CPU frequency to a low level to make it run at a sweet spot where there is enough performance but not much heat. Saying that as someone who installed Linux on a Chromebook with 1215u. (Don't do that) I do that with other AMD machines as well. I always throttle CPU to base frequency unless I really need max performance, which has not happened yet. I think that's just what I Intel or AMD should have done in the first place -- lower both the base frequency and max turbo frequency to the point that the fan does not even turn on in most workflows. I suspect that they want to look good in benchmarks, so they set max turbo frequency very high. But that doesn't matter in 90% of the workflows.
  - papichulo2023 2y ago
    Good point actually, wanted to install Linux on it because Chromeox is very restricted, why do you say I shouldnt?
    - rty32 2y ago
      Now that you are interested, I'm happy to share more. For context, I got this exact machine https://www.ebay.com/itm/134571642124 https://www.ebay.com/itm/134571642124 at $174, and did it because I wanted a cheap, 15.6" laptop with an accurate & high resolution screen that is more useful than an iPad Pro. A refurbished machine of this model almost perfectly fits those requirements. I installed Linux (Mint) because lots of things like window management and VPN are cumbersome on ChromeOS, and I want very little to do with Google. I didn't install Windows because memory is limited (8GB) and the experience wouldn't be good, but if it had 16GB I would have done that instead. Issues I have run into: * Keyboard layout * Apparently Caps Lock and Esc keys are going to be a problem. And if you have a remote session where the remote machine has Caps Lock and Esc swapped, it would be a mess. As a (vscode) vim user, I ended up doing Ctrl+[ for Esc. (If I spent more time on it I probably would have figured it out) * Also apparently, F11 and F12 keys don't exist, and it can be painful for debugging. * You need to properly map F1-F10 as well. * Audio issues -- there is a chromebook-linux-audio project that enables audio on chromebooks, and I know other people have successfully used it for this model but on a different distro. The project clearly says it does not support Ubuntu, and it indeed didn't work for me. Not that I need or care about audio on this machine dedicated to programming, but missing audio can be annoying at times when you need it. * Power management. I don't know if it's bad for this model, for Mint or bad for Linux in general, but it's annoying. I think I have properly throttled the CPU via auto-cpufreq, but sometimes the fan runs crazy when nothing is happening. (Granted, that happens on well-supported Windows laptops as well, and I don't know why.) Then something is weird with suspend ("sleep") -- even after setting things up so that closing lid = suspend, after doing it, the laptop goes out of battery within a few hours. I have to manually suspend every time I am done to preserve battery. Basically, I am seeing a number of issues with using the machines, some specific to Chromebooks, and some that may or may not be associated with Chromebooks specifically. I know it is always a bumpy road to use Linux on laptops, but this is rougher. It's probably not worth the effort, unless you really want to do that, like in my case. Or to put it this way -- if I didn't intend the machine to do lots of development work and I want to be in the Google ecosystem, it would have been a perfect machine otherwise.

Let's be fair here, Intel CPUs have terrible battery life under every OS.

bee_rider 2y ago

Eh, play around with powertop a bit, things aren’t so bad in Linux.

Miraste 2y ago
That can get it to be okay, if you put some effort in and get lucky with the manufacturer, but it's still worse than basically anything else that's modern and supports Linux.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  On my system looking at it right now, I only see wireless consuming much power. Everything else is below 100mW. I can’t really blame x86 for the wireless power consumption (maybe Intel more generally though).
acdha 2y ago
Possibly, but how much time do you need to spend getting closer to the out of the box macOS experience? If it’s more than an hour or so you’re paying more to have an involuntary hobby.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  That seems sort of beside the point. The existence of not-power-hungry Linux installs indicates that there’s something Microsoft could do about the problem. For me, I like a convertible laptop which I cannot buy from Apple for any amount of money as far as I know. If I could have gotten a fully unlocked iPad I probably would have gone for that, but they don’t seem to exist. Yet, at least! Here’s hoping. It actually would be nice if Microsoft would figure out their part of the mess, because that would give people the ability to trade money for battery life.

6SixTy 2y ago

Doesn't help that there's a ton of different hardware vendors that likely have their own ACPI bugs, effectively making good power management impossible.

papichulo2023 2y ago

No really, I have a Chromebook with a 1215u and de battery life is pretty decent, in the other hand my 1255u laptop with windows not so much...

rty32 2y ago
I think Chromebook throttle the CPU frequency to a low level to make it run at a sweet spot where there is enough performance but not much heat. Saying that as someone who installed Linux on a Chromebook with 1215u. (Don't do that) I do that with other AMD machines as well. I always throttle CPU to base frequency unless I really need max performance, which has not happened yet. I think that's just what I Intel or AMD should have done in the first place -- lower both the base frequency and max turbo frequency to the point that the fan does not even turn on in most workflows. I suspect that they want to look good in benchmarks, so they set max turbo frequency very high. But that doesn't matter in 90% of the workflows.
- papichulo2023 2y ago
  Good point actually, wanted to install Linux on it because Chromeox is very restricted, why do you say I shouldnt?
  - rty32 2y ago
    Now that you are interested, I'm happy to share more. For context, I got this exact machine https://www.ebay.com/itm/134571642124 https://www.ebay.com/itm/134571642124 at $174, and did it because I wanted a cheap, 15.6" laptop with an accurate & high resolution screen that is more useful than an iPad Pro. A refurbished machine of this model almost perfectly fits those requirements. I installed Linux (Mint) because lots of things like window management and VPN are cumbersome on ChromeOS, and I want very little to do with Google. I didn't install Windows because memory is limited (8GB) and the experience wouldn't be good, but if it had 16GB I would have done that instead. Issues I have run into: * Keyboard layout * Apparently Caps Lock and Esc keys are going to be a problem. And if you have a remote session where the remote machine has Caps Lock and Esc swapped, it would be a mess. As a (vscode) vim user, I ended up doing Ctrl+[ for Esc. (If I spent more time on it I probably would have figured it out) * Also apparently, F11 and F12 keys don't exist, and it can be painful for debugging. * You need to properly map F1-F10 as well. * Audio issues -- there is a chromebook-linux-audio project that enables audio on chromebooks, and I know other people have successfully used it for this model but on a different distro. The project clearly says it does not support Ubuntu, and it indeed didn't work for me. Not that I need or care about audio on this machine dedicated to programming, but missing audio can be annoying at times when you need it. * Power management. I don't know if it's bad for this model, for Mint or bad for Linux in general, but it's annoying. I think I have properly throttled the CPU via auto-cpufreq, but sometimes the fan runs crazy when nothing is happening. (Granted, that happens on well-supported Windows laptops as well, and I don't know why.) Then something is weird with suspend ("sleep") -- even after setting things up so that closing lid = suspend, after doing it, the laptop goes out of battery within a few hours. I have to manually suspend every time I am done to preserve battery. Basically, I am seeing a number of issues with using the machines, some specific to Chromebooks, and some that may or may not be associated with Chromebooks specifically. I know it is always a bumpy road to use Linux on laptops, but this is rougher. It's probably not worth the effort, unless you really want to do that, like in my case. Or to put it this way -- if I didn't intend the machine to do lots of development work and I want to be in the Google ecosystem, it would have been a perfect machine otherwise.