this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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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.
Gaming laptops are a bit worse on Linux. But this isn't generally applicable.
I have a 2015 ultrabook that still gets 5h+ on battery under Linux. My 2022 gaming laptop required some tweaking but now does 8-10h on a charge as well.
My work laptop doesn't have a discrete GPU; I bought it explicitly to get better battery life (I really like the gaming laptop for its 120Hz screen and other specs, but the battery life made it a no-go). It gets around 4-5 hours, which is good enough for me, but I'm sure it would get better battery life on Windows.
How did you get better battery life on the gaming laptop, if you don't mind my asking? It uses a NVIDIA GPU.
I made a script that monitors the power state of the laptop and automatically toggles the following things:
cpufreqwhen not plugged in.That takes me from 4-5h to ~8-10 and the computer is still very useable.
Mine is an AMD device but Nvidia offers similar toggles through the
nvidia-smicommand.Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it's mostly the 120Hz display that's killing my battery life...which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I'll have to give these things a try!
Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I'm based.
Yes, it was slim pickings. I tried a couple last year and finally ended up keeping an all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14.
Others I tried:
Today I would just preorder a Framework 16.
That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.
Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM's network to do so). I didn't get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately...
I've heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don't know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.
I couldn't find one locally either. Ended up ordering a returned product from Amazon abroad, a friend of mine then shipped it over. The stuff I do to avoid Nvidia...
I was buying a new laptop subsidized on 80% store credit, so I could only go for what they had in stock, unfortunately. I still haven't had a single computer with an AMD GPU, but iGPU laptops give me a taste of what things could be like without NVIDIA...