alt Hacker NewsThe last time I tried Linux on a consumer device was 15 years ago. The battery life was unacceptable. Have things improved since then? Phoronix doesn't seem to test battery life.
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I have a Framework 13 running an AMD AI 300 Series with Fedora as my personal laptop and an MBP M2 Pro as my work machine.
I would say that the Framework is fine for battery life when you’re using it but loses like 20-30% of battery per day in sleep mode vs like 1% per day for the MBP.
The workaround I use now is to set the FW to hibernate after 30 minutes of sleep so it’s not dead when I decide to use it again after a few days.
The downside of this is that waking up takes a couple of minutes and so I still tend to use the MBP if I need to do something quick and don’t want to wait for the hibernate tax.
I bought a Thinkpad T440s in 2013. I would occasionally forget my charging cable at home, and could do a full day of work, with youtube playing in the background, on battery.
On the right laptop, linux will have decent battery life. On the wrong laptop, windows will have terrible battery life.
The stupid answer: it depends
Honestly I have no issues on my own AMD laptop but iirc nvidia drivers are still relatively bad at keeping power consumption low.
It would be nice if Linux got the same vendor support as windows.
I've been running Linux in laptops, as painful as it can be since the 90s. The answer is that it depends on the laptop.