this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Has power management for laptops gotten any better in the last couple of years on desktop Linux? I distro hopped for a year 3ish years ago but just didn’t like the fairly significant reduction in battery life.
I've uses linux for the last 5 years switching to windows time to time. And consistently I have had less power consumption in linux than in windows.
I usually install linux mint on my laptop.
This tracks. I have recently gone back to running a Windows desktop machine for gaming, and now I have to actually shut it off because:
a) that fucking thing never stays asleep. Clean install with nothing other than Steam and a couple of games, sleep settings mean nothing. Just wakes up, stays awake forever.
b) Fortunately I have an enterprise license key so I don't get as much random bullshit, but every update there is some new fucking thing I don't want.
My machine is a desktop, but I can't image how this works well on laptops.
Debian and Ubuntu works great on my ThinkPad. Getting better battery life in fact coz it sleeps properly compared to windows.
There still are some problems, unfortunately.
Not a world of difference, but my laptop holds ~15% less when running Debian over Windows.
On Arch I installed the "auto-cpufreq" package and my battery life is fine
Depends. It's more fiddly than windows to get set up but there's a lot more options for power management.
I've got a tiny 7 inch laptop and I genuinely can't figure out how to stop the fan from constantly running under windows. On Linux, switchable underclocking and powertop make it last much longer.
This is assuming you've not got an Nvidia GPU in your laptop, I haven't tried in years but toggling the GPU was always difficult.
afaik yes, depends on distro and selected DE.
XFCE is solid, GNOME (ew lol) is solid, KDE last I checked was also solid
There is a slight pain with Fedora (and others) that use zswap/zram which disables hibernation. You can make a setup that swapsoff the memory properly so the laptop can hibernate instead of sleep, its just annoying-that its not a default feature or very easy to set up with a switch.
I've been getting fairly good battery life on arch and popOS on my laptop. Think it depends a bit on what laptop you've got as well. If I were to guess I'd say my current pop install gets ~10% less battery life than on windows, while I was probably even closer than that on arch after a bit of tinkering.