I will need to get a laptop in the foreseeable future, and I really want to stick to Linux. However, I may need to be out-of-home for 12+ hours straight in a day. After some research, it seems people are generally not that impressed with battery life on Linux?

The laptop does not need to do anything heavy duty, as I will remote back into my already very beefy desktop back home.

I guess a common solution to this light use case is M2 MacBook if one wants to completely throw battery concern out of the window. Well… let’s just say it’s a love-hate relationship.

  • @[email protected]
    17•1 year ago

    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.