How bad is battery life on Linux laptop?

My thinkpads have always gone further on ubuntu than on windaz.

Battery life on laptops is always over exaggerated regardless what OS you run.

12+ hours of actual battery life during use just doesn't happen.

Flat out superior to Windows. All that is needed is TLP and PowerTop.

It depends on the distro and how you configure it.

For distros that just work out of the box like ubuntu or manjaro it should be about the same as windows unless there's something weird in your laptop, but in general there are 3 really useful tools that I recommend you check out are:

• TLPUI: a user interface for TLP, a power management tool that's used in most distros. With this you can configure your min/max clock speeds for your CPU and GPU when on battery vs plugged in, CPU governor, display brightness, automatic poweroff of drives and USB devices, and many other things
• throttled (https://github.com/erpalma/throttled): originally created to workaround a BIOS bug on some thinkpads, this can now set things like turbo duration, power limits and undervolting, all based on whether you're on battery or plugged in
• LACT: if you have an AMD GPU, you can use this to undervolt it or to set a better power limit

Setting these up properly on my thinkpad t480 with manjaro gave it a good 50-60% of extra battery life for what I use it for (I'm a teacher so mostly presentations and various IDEs). You should check them out.

It depends. If you get a fairly standard laptop from a brand that has some Linux awareness (Lenovo, Dell, Framework,...) you should be alright out of the box.

Gaming laptops generally are a bit worse since GPU switching is not as well integrated. I managed to get mine to parity but with a lot of tweaking. Devices with only integrated graphics tend to be fine out of the box.

It's very dependent on the laptop. Some ThinkPad get better battery life than on Linux because a lot of kernel devs use them.

Gaming laptops will have marginally worse battery life when properly configured. But in general you'll get better battery life on Linux in my experience.

I just spent two weeks trying to convince a new intel Zenbook laptop to have decent battery life. It would eat the battery both awake and asleep. Went through the Arch wiki on suspend issues. Discovered that the bios has a broken vestigial S3 suspend (which more and more vendors are shipping); the modern suspend mode is now S0ix (s2idle). Found that my system was only getting into C2 and C3 out of C10 levels of S0ix power-saving-state nirvana.

Somehow, I lucked upon finding that the Intel Rapid Storage/VMD setting in bios was what kept the processor from ever going to lower power states. Once I disabled that, nearly everything else fell into place. The cpu ran cooler at normal use, battery lasted longer, and power burn during sleep went from 4% an hour to negligible.

This was fun. Not one tool successfully pointed me at the real problem. It took one random dell support post to set me on the right path. https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211879. I spent two weeks chasing the same problem that somebody else had in 2021. Linux doesn't have a [WARNING] for detecting a damned VMD, and it doesn't have a means to tell the VMD to fuck off? The stupid hardware doesn't have the sense to not fuck up the processor if it isn't attached to its Windows-only driver? I don't understand how anybody has been able to use an intel for the last couple of generations if this is how they work.

In conclusion - battery life is actually pretty great now. But it was a bloody nightmare to get here.

I've installed a few distros on my gaming laptop for fun and something I've noticed was that your desktop environment may have a large impact on your battery life.

With Mint, my battery would die in like 2.5 hours. After installing Arch with the Budgie desktop environment, I've noticed that my battery life was twice as long as when it was running on Mint.

It really depends on the hardware and your use cases (ie. workflow).

I have a laptop (Dell Latitude 7420) with an integrated GPU (all Intel Tiger Lake), and I regularly get between 8 - 10 hours of battery life with just using terminals and web browsers (Firefox).

On GNOME, you will want to take advantage of the power profiles. With Pop, you can take advantage of their power management system. Otherwise, you can use something like TLP to minimize your power usage.

Moreover, if you are watching videos, then you want to make sure it is GPU accelerated and using the builtin hardware codecs rather than relying on the CPU to do the decoding.

I think that 12 hours on Linux on Intel/AMD is a stretch... but 8-10 hours is achievable and realistic (from my experience anyway).

I actually get 2x the battery life of windows on my ThinkPad. If you run a distro like Arch or Gentoo you will have to configure some things to get good battery life, but with Mint or something it just works™. If you want a whole lot of battery life you could get a laptop that has a replaceable battery, like the T480 (still plenty powerful for Linux), then your max life is limited only by how many extra batteries you are willing to carry.

HP Elitebook 840 G5 here, doubled battery time after switching from Windows 10 to Debian 12.

Not bad at all. With some tweaking, it is commensurate with other operating systems.

Pretty bad. My gaming laptop gets 2 hours on Arch and 4 on Windows. My work laptop gets 4 hours on Arch compared to 6 hours on Windows. My 2-in-1 laptop from 8 years ago gets about the same, if not more. My 2009 laptop gets like 8 hours, and probably more than Windows would.

Edit: I use auto-cpufreq, but this doesn't help much. Power-profiles helps a little.

My T480 has a very worn internal battery, but still does 8-10 hours. Thanks to the powerbridge I can hotswap a second battery to run for another 7 hours.

On my ThinkPad I get far more battery life than I ever did on windows

I've got a Surface Laptop 3 running Fedora that is always dead after an extended sleep. Actual working battery life is not bad though.

My exceedingly old X230 with an inefficient sandy bridge chip gets 10 hours with normal light use. If I start using CAD or something more intensive it drops a bit, but it’s still likely there’s a machine that can do a 10 hour workday with your workload.

I doubt you can get 12h on an x86_64 computer, regardless of OS. With tweaks Linux can match Windows battery life but if you really need 12h get that M2 MacBook.

It depends on a few factors. Stock laptop experience with no power management software will likely result in poor battery life. You will need some kind of power management like TLP, auto-cpufreq, or powertop to handle your laptop's power management settings.

Second is the entire issue of dedicated GPUs and hybrid graphics in laptops, which can be a real issue for Linux laptops. In my own laptop with a dGPU, I am reasonably certain that the dGPU simply never turns off. I have yet to figure out a working solution for this, and so my battery life seems to be consistently worse than the Windows install dual-booted with it on the same machine.

installed Linux Mint on various apple macbooks i got second hand and the battery life is abysmal.

I just installed openSUSE on my laptop, and I think it's actually better, mostly because it actually sleeps properly.

I’ve never really noticed a huge difference with the Dell XPS models we use at my work. There’s a developer edition of that laptop that ships with Ubuntu, though, so they might have more optimizations than some manufacturers.

I think most people would recommend getting a laptop that has manufacturer support for Linux, which includes dedicated Linux laptop companies (like System76) but also certain Dell and Lenovo models. (There’s several others too. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.)

My Tuxedo Pulse 15 (Gen 1) had 12h of battery life doing office work, when it was new. Now with some degradation, it still gets 9h. Of course that changes heavily depending on workload and screen brightness

Considering my gaming laptop, it does 1h on Linux and, if I recall correctly, 2hrs on Windows. You can pick a laptop with a good Linux support so that you can have a good battery life

Lol I haven't had batteries in a laptop for years 😹

I have an older 6th gen Intel XPS that probably lasted 7 hours max on windows and I get 6+ on Linux. Not really noticeable to me. I should have gotten the 1080p screen instead of this 4k monstrosity and battery life would have gone up 50%. The thing is also a beast at sleeping and will go well over 2 weeks before the battery drains. Which is great because I just use it on the couch now and will open it up for a few minutes here and there before shoving it back between the cushions again.

Last year I got a 12th gen framework and battery life is disappointing under Linux. Maybe 5ish hours. I can live with that but when sleeping it still drains like 25% a day.

Using a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i with 3070 and the batter life is regrettably similar. I desperately wish my Linux boot could dunk on the battery life of windows but it is extremely similar, which I guess I should take as a win.

Running Mint with 6.1 kernel, but have tried a slew of different builds and they are all within hitting distance. Again. I should be happy but I'll only be happy if all the hours I have spent screwing with my OS leads to a clear win of some sort other than the intangible benefit of sticking it ever so slightly to MS.

My lenovo yoga slim 7 pro x with a ryzen 6800hs consumed about 6 watts at idle when I used manjaro and i3 with auto-cpufreq. That meant it got around 8 hours of screen on time in the real world and up to 10 if I barely taxed it. Now on fedora with gnome and wayland and no tweaks it also consumes just over 6 watts at idle but we'll we how it pans out. If there are any power tuning tips for gnome/wayland/amd I'd like to hear them. I don't know if auto-cpufreq is still relevent with the newest kernels.

A lot of the newer AMD models have excellent battery life thanks to the combined efforts of Vavle & AMD on the Steam Deck.

I can only speak from experience, but all three of my Thinkpads last about 20-30% longer on Linux than Windows.

Use a desktop with power management and tlp, better than windows.

I can give you my opinion on a Gigabyte Clevo Laptop.

My laptop both ran to fast and hot which drained the battery. This was an issue in both Fedora and Manjaro.

I need to use different utilities to reign in the battery depending on the OS. Fedora it came out of the box but Manjaro I needed to install Slimbook Battery.

The other issue is the networking kills my sleep. Fedora was better with this than Manjaro, but newer versions of Manjaro kill WiFi when you put it to sleep. So it been better.

In comparison with windows while id like it to just work. Being able to tweak it is much preferable.

I use a 2020 hp envy 360 with a ryzen 4700u. I can get away all day typing or websurfing indoors. I can also drain the battery in two hours by playing games.

One of the things I like, is how easy it is to govern the cpu. If I know I'm away from a wall for a bit I can govern the cpu to 1.4ghz and it'll last a long time. I haven't actually done any testing to see how long.

im getting pretty similar results to what it was on windows i think. endevouros kde on lenovo yoga, with tlp conservation mode when charging.

https://errande.com/2021/09/linux-laptop-battery/

My old laptop got a new life after switching to minimalist linux instead of windows. So much longer battery time. Extended lifetime by years.

I get 10 hours of my usage on my framework. It really depends on model and your setup.

On r/thinkpad (I think), I at some point read about the AMD powered machines having extraordinary battery life on Linux, to the degree that I regretted my very recent Intel ThinkPad purchase. Maybe that's something to search for. I think it was the new T14.

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I have ~1.25hrs of uptime on Windows. Almost the same, if not more, on Arch.

It's really almost the same.

With mine (an Acer Aspire A515 I got for free from where my mom works) I get around 3 hours (according to the time remaining, although in longer use sessions at my desk I usually plug it in every hour or 2, and unplug it when its full), which is about the same as Windows thinks it is. So i would say it gets around the same battery life whether I use Windows or Linux

Using a Matebook running NixOS as my daily driver. Battery life is pleasingly good, lasting up to 9 hours. This without tinkering with battery settings at all.

It's around the same for me, altough windows is slightly better when battery saver is activated (hp pavilion 14 with an i7 1255u, windows 11 and fedora 38)

I'm sporting 8-10h on my Tuxedo Pulse 15 (Gen 1)

At least with AMD my runtime was always pretty good under Linux. Since some years at least. Was on Intel before and always had worse battery life with Linux - most probably because of the additional NVidia GPU, that didn't play nicely with Linux power management

Depends on the device. Some devices are horrible but some last for 18+ hours.