Isn't it a searing indictment of the entire Intel laptop chip lineup that a MacBook Air M1 has half the battery capacity (50Wh) while giving easily twice the battery life with as good or better performance -- and with no fans!
It's also a searing indictment of Linux. I get less than half the battery life on my Alienware AMD laptop under Linux than under Windows. I don't know what Linux is doing wrong here, but it is not energy efficient.
There's a lot of Linux apologists in your replies but my experience is exactly the same _with a laptop that supports Linux_ (Framework laptop).
I'm running a very recent kernel in Fedora and have tried numerous power saving mechanisms (currently autocpufreq, although it's results are not much different from gnome PPD) and I'm lucky if I get 3 hours from the thing while running 10-15 FF tabs and a single instance of VSCode+Remote SSH extension. This is ~1/2 of what I can get in Windows.
I think a lot of Linux users would be surpised how good their battery life would be if they installed Windows on their laptops. It's not Linux's fault per se, it's just that there's considerably less engineering manpower going into tuning the power efficiency of laptop hardware on Linux. People get up in arms because they can't reconcile the fact that "Windows is bloated" with the fact that it gets better battery life, but if you think about it for a few seconds it really shouldn't surprise anyone.
It IS linux's fault, in the way that whenever someone new comes into the ecosystem and says "hey this important thing doesn't work well or is broken for me" and get accosted from all directions by crazy people who haven't touched mac or windows in 20 years who insist that what you describe isn't possible, linux is super easy to fix yourself (lol), and that ideas from computing in the 60s are unambiguously the best ideas ever made in computing.
The linux ecosystem doesn't even have a legitimate window manager. When people tell the linux world "hey there's an issue" the linux world always responds with "fuck off"
I agree with everything you said except for the window manager comment. i3/sway puts MacOS and Windows to shame. I could get used to my work macbook if only it would let me move focus in more than one dimension (i.e. super+left/right/up/down instead of cmd+tab back in time).
MacOS is especially bad because they don't even try to address their deficiencies. They just bandaid over it with an app ecosystem and then don't give that ecosystem an API that's to sufficient to do the job (e.g. the limitations of amethyst and amphetamine re: focus control and lid closing).
100% this. I'm using a Windows notebook at work, and I cannot go for a single week without running into some random window management bug. Despite it being the origin of its name, Windows is actually really bad at windows stuff.
And that's before we get into intentionally missing features like focus-on-hover.
1. Every once in a while, when I move a browser tab into a new window, the window spawns entirely off screen. At least that's what I think. It's completely invisible, but I can focus it and bring up the Alt-Space menu, which shows up in a random screen corner. I can start moving it, but it never moves into view. I just cannot get a hold of it. Only fix is to close the window and try to get back to the open webpage manually. It feels like this happens most often with Youtube tabs where a video is playing.
2. I have FancyZones set up (using PowerToys, i.e. an official MS tool). When a window is snapped to one of these zones, and I minimize it and bring it up again, there is a chance that it has a baffling white border around it that sticks with it while resizing. Only fix is to maximize the window, then snap it back into the zone.
3. Something that I've seen from time to time with different applications (when it's with my browser, it may be related to 1, but it happens with e.g. notepad too): There is a chance that new windows open up in just the most baffling geometries. For example, Notepad opening up at ~6000px width, stretching across most of my two screens' combined width. Or, particularly irritating, browser windows coming up at what must be ~10000px width and height, with the top way above the top edge of either screen, so I can only use Alt-Space -> Maximize to grab a hold of it.
4. Windows spawning on one screen, but using DPI ratio of the other screen, so either cartoonishly small or cartoonishly large. The one that comes to mind the most is the Outlook calendar reminder popup, but I think I've seen other apps suffering from this too.
I'm not sure about whether it's supported on Windows (and why if it's not), but I think it refers to having whichever window the cursor is over being "active" by default. For example, if you have two windows open that both have a text input focused (like maybe a text editor and a browser), the more common window-management paradigm is to consider one of them "active" independent of the cursor. If the text editor is active, you need to "switch" to the browser to type into it (by clicking on it, alt-tabbing, closing the editor, etc.). An alternative way of doing things would be to have the text you type go into whichever window the cursor is over. I haven't tried out using this, but I do find this behavior noticeable when playing a game on one monitor and having a web browser open on the other. Often if something is loading, I'll switch over to the browser to read hacker news or something while waiting, but then when the game is finished loading and I switch over, I'll try to move or something and be momentarily baffled at the lack of movement until I realize that I just typed "w" or something into the browser.
I think Linux is not less efficient than other major OSes. I am able to squeeze 5% more battery from a MacBook Air 11'' Late 2012 using Linux vs macOS.
This is possible because the machine is basically a pure Intel device, so in-kernel support for most hardware components is good. The key aspect is to implement fairly aggressive udev rules and to use no desktop environment, so that the CPU stays in powersaving states for as long as possible. This is where Linux really shines, as X plus a window manager is much lighter than anything else.
There is still some room for improvement with a custom kernel, a custom Firefox build or a better wireless card, the only non-Intel component. Broadcom Linux drivers are awful. Also Safari is a marvel in terms of efficiency.
No, it's not. Keep in mind in Linux, desktop environment means a big framework such as GNOME or KDE that runs on top of X or Wayland, i.e. a graphics server.
You can run bare X or Wayland, plus a window manager and cherry-picked daemons, to achieve the same sort of functionality e.g. desktop notifications, network roaming or device automounting.
My point is that bare X plus cherry-picked services tends to be much more efficient, because you don't need to pay a performance tax for the things you don't use.
Mac: Battery life sucks, let's make our own chip to make it better
Windows: Battery life sucks, we'll try to improve the software and maybe use a different CPU
Linux: Just turn off your desktop and recreate its functionality using a dozen command line daemons and selectively run graphics only when you need it. It worked in DOS, why not now?
lol and we wonder why desktop Linux never came...
I've seen a lot of Linux apologetics over the years, but this is the single funniest comment I've ever read on the topic
I feel like I'm watching cult members nodding at each other and wondering "why don't they get it, it's so obvious!" while everyone outside just backs away slooowly...
I think a lot of this boils down to the distribution you install, what kind of background services it runs, and how effective its energy tunings are.
As an example, IMO an idle computer should have all CPU save one or two at 0% utilization, and that remaining CPU(s) shouldn't be averaging more than a few percent, in short spiky bursts. FreeBSD or Debian are like this, but Ubuntu is not.
Yes, saying that a laptop runs "Linux" does not provide any useful information when talking about battery life.
I use Gentoo on a Dell Precision laptop and I do not see any battery lifetime difference between it and Windows.
However, I do not doubt that with other Linux distributions or with a Gentoo that has a very different configuration, the results would not be the same.
I think that it is very wrong to say that a laptop with Linux has a worse battery life than one with Windows, but it is right to say that in many cases a laptop with Linux needs an experienced user to configure it properly, in order to have the same battery life that it would have with Windows out of the box.
On the other hand, when installing Windows 10 Enterprise on embedded computers, I have encountered many cases when Linux had great performance in a default installation, while with Windows 10 I had to waste many days with tuning, e.g. with discovering that certain services must be disabled, until obtaining an acceptable performance.
Why do people write comments like this as though it's reasonable way to use an everyday driver PC?
"I don't use a DE" - well then yes, obviously but you've also removed like 80% of the functionality to turn the thing into a dumb console. That's not what I want to use a computer for.
No, DE doesn't mean I have a dumb console. It just means it's a bit lighter. I have all services a modern desktop has, I still run X plus a window manager.
I imagine Xfce or even GNOME 3 can be tweaked a bit to be almost equally energy efficient.
> I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.
Before making offensive comments, have you thought about the meaning of my statement?
For example, a modern DE offers desktop notifications. I still have that by running a desktop notification daemon, dunst, despite just using X plus a window manager but no DE.
Linux is very much broken into small composable components, the same way Clojure is. To take this comparison further, it is extremely ignorant to claim you can't have the same functionality Rails offers just because you don't use a big framework (which is the equivalent to a DE).
I feel like this argument would be moot if all had the same understanding of the terms they were using. People seem bit hazy on what that the term desktop environment actually describes.
My car has a roof, it just wasn't chosen for me by someone at MS/Apple/Gnome/KDE. A custom hand-built car is not necessarily more primitive than a factory-standard one, or any less appealing.
I mean I don't have icons on desktop but that's about only miss of feature (that I don't use on windows either). Alt + F2 for app launcher + rest of it in autostart and under few bindings for common ones. If anything it's faster than anything under Windows, although definitely a power user thing.
Also something like XFCE will still get you the graphical things to fondle without as much power usage as GNOME. The problem is really those (especially GNOME) pissing on performance and thus power usage
This is not a text only console. It's how I was using UNIX workstations circa 1990. Boot to a script running startx to run X11 and a window manager (ttwm?).
What was I missing? Probably a start menu / launcher (but I guess it can be installed and run anyway) and a control panel for settings.
Which modern software won't run in such a setup? Maybe dbus? Systemd? I think a lot of GUI software would still run, some won't, daemons and servers probably would.
Is this something for the nerdiest 1% of the nerdiest 1%? Definitely. I won't do that myself because it's too much of a hassle and I'll probably have to revert to a standard DE to run some software I need for work, but it will work, mostly.
>The linux ecosystem doesn't even have a legitimate window manager.
The rest is largely correct, but this part is completely wrong. Linux has a bunch of legitimate window managers, most of them much better than MacOSX or Windows.
The problems with window managers on Linux are:
1) fragmentation: there's a bunch of them, all competing with each other, but with insufficient dev resources, so they all feel half-baked,
2) unreliability: because of #1, they have a lot of bugs
3) churn: with Gnome and KDE specifically, they keep throwing things out just as they finally make their product mature and starting over every so often, subjecting users to systems that are never really mature or reliable.
Interesting comment regarding the window manager, I had to use a Mac at work recently and apparently one has to use 3rd party tools to be able to snap windows. Coming from KDE Plasma I found this astonishing.
Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous macOS doesn't have this out of the box. Then again this is the same OS that decided to make the maximize button turn into full-screen zoom instead. Cuz who ever needs more than one window at a time? lol
I love my Macbook, but really wish they'd borrow some ideas from Windows and Linux
Important note, when I said "Window manager" I was actually bitching about the stupidity of X and Wayland both being pretty bad, missing functionality, or specifically for X, being so old the original ideas and ideology it was built with don't even make sense anymore. I guess that's "Windowing system" instead? Either way, I shouldn't have to know anything about any of that to use a damn computer. It should be a tool, not a lifestyle or ideology.
Wayland is not equivalent to X Server technically, X usually refers to the Xorg implementation whereas Wayland is a protocol with multiple implementations, i.e. by KDE, GNOME, Sway etc.
My experience with Wayland has been very solid within the last year or so I've been on it exclusively but it's definitely implementation dependent. You're right you shouldn't have to know about these things and I certainly get the sense that's the goal. I mean one disadvantage of a system being developed in the open is that things aren't necessarily 'released' as such when 'ready'. They're in the open for people to adopt/or not, many times still rapidly evolving.
I value this approach but it's certainly not for everyone.
> It should be a tool, not a lifestyle or ideology.
That's...a very subjective statement? I think free software definitely has its place as an ideology if you will, if people want to live by it and are willing to put with the downsides why not? Some people are in it to preserve general purpose computing for the next generation let's say. I see that as completely valid since nobody forces you to use their output.
But given how expensive the Apple ecosystem is, I would certainly not expect things like having to know that poll() will not work correctly after an update[1], if it's indeed just a tool.
Plenty of regular people have to get at least somewhat familiar with the Windows Registry for example.
Point is, in this industry these sorts of things happen and so you do end up having to know about certain internal inner workings of the system you're working on one way or another. It's obviously more of a case on a system developed in the open but not exclusively.
please, windows can't even get alt+tab right... it just goes to whatever the fuck clown that wrote it thought would be good idea instead of previously focused window
Let alone arcane tech like "search in list of open windows"
I'm another f/t Fedora user. I've been using Linux on dozens of laptops for over 2 decades. Not once in my experience has Linux got the same battery life as Windows on the same machine, regardless of tweaks. I did have about 5 years on MacOS, and that was the best of all, but that was different hardware of course.
Linux just is worse on battery than any of the other mainstream OSs in my experience, though the margin has reduced over time. It's still my platform of choice (because even now, in 2022, the choices available are crap), but denial makes them disappear only from the imagination, not reality.
Framework's Linux support is very... DYI. I would say it's a long step away from a laptop designed for Linux (the new Chromebook offering being the exception that proves the rule).
> It's not Linux's fault per se, it's just that there's considerably less engineering manpower going into tuning the power efficiency of laptop hardware on Linux.
You're not wrong, but it's worse than that. A lot of the power management is tied in to proprietary firmware. Then there's the whole Intel Gen12 debacle...
I would argue that Chromebooks are pretty solid proof that it isn't Linux's fault, because they by and large Linux systems that get fantastic power management results.
> People get up in arms because they can't reconcile the fact that "Windows is bloated" with the fact that it gets better battery life, but if you think about it for a few seconds it really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Windows gets better battery life on laptops designed for better battery life with Windows. At the same time, it is often surprising how running a program under WINE on Linux will outperform the same program running on Windows. ;-)
> I would argue that Chromebooks are pretty solid proof that it isn't Linux's fault, because they by and large Linux systems that get fantastic power management results.
Sorry, that should read:
"I would argue that Chromebooks are pretty solid proof that it isn't Linux's fault, because they are Linux systems that by and large get fantastic power management results.
I'm not convinced Framework actually supports Linux, though. AFAICT, it supports Windows and can ship with no OS, and you have to do the rest yourself. To predictable end (e.g. having to deal with kernel parameters to make it work.)
The firmware involved is also distinctly non-trivial.
That's actually one of the big reasons I've held off on buying one (although the #1 reason is lack of AMD options), and am eyeing laptops from HP and Lenovo that actually advertise full Linux support (like the HP Dev One).
Even if those laptops don't support Linux as well as they claim to, it seems like it'd be less of a headache to deal with than Framework with their unique dongle situation.
My experience is exactly the opposite.
If that make me a "Linux apologist" I don't really care.
Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only).
Under light load the system is using 6-8w (about 9-10h of usage on the 80WH battery), under 4w when completely idle. This is latest Fedora on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme with KDE. I want to see that with Windows.
You have to invest a bit more time with Linux (for example the fingerprint reader on my Laptop prevented the CPU from going into lower power modes), and that part is unfortunate.
On the other hand I never experience things randomly not working like it was with Windows.
>Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only).
Sorry, but that's not a good argument in favor of Linux when basic power management is not part of the OS and you need to set it up yourself manually. Can you imagine Microsoft or Apple shipping their OSs without power management? I need an OS to work out of the box so I can get to work/entertainment, not a hobby to tinker with. I still enjoy tinkering with Linux but it should be only when I want-to, not a need-to.
> I want to see that with Windows.
Yeah, you can get Linux to be more economical than Windows by manually installing a bunch of tools that throttle down the CPU into its lowest power mode and running it at 600MHz fixed all the time, and now you have a laptop that's super slow, all for the sake of battery life and winning online arguments. Good job. /s You can force that in Windows as well, but why would you?
I want to see Linux automatically scale the CPU power and frequency based on the load put on it like Windows does: idles at 600MHz when doing nothing, click on the Firefox tab and it shoots up to 3,6GHz, then back down to 800MHz. That's what any sane OS should do out of the box, not have you install and fiddle with a bunch of tools and maybe still not be as good.
>On the other hand I never experience things randomly not working like it was with Windows.
I have way more things randomly not working on Ubuntu 22.04 Gnome at work than on Windows 11 at home (none actually on this one).
> Sorry, but that's not a good argument in favor of Linux when basic power management is not part of the OS and you need to set it up yourself manually. Can you imagine Microsoft or Apple shipping their OSs without power management? I need an OS to work out of the box so I can get to work/entertainment, not a hobby to tinker with. I still enjoy tinkering with Linux but it should be only when I want-to, not a need-to.
That entirely depends on the distro you use. Any "mainstream" distro should already have power saving tools set up properly. Of course if you use something more DIY like Arch you will have to set those up yourself. You can't just group every distro together as "Linux" when you will get a different experience on each one.
> I want to see Linux automatically scale the CPU power and frequency based on the load put on it like Windows does: idles at 600MHz when doing nothing, click on the Firefox tab and it shoots up to 3,6GHz, then back down to 800MHz. That's what any sane OS should do out of the box, not have you install and fiddle with a bunch of tools and maybe still not be as good.
Unless you are using the performance or powersave governors (except with intel-pstate active) that's already what it should be doing. Once again you shouldn't have to tinker with that stuff on any sane distro.
>Once again you shouldn't have to tinker with that stuff on any sane distro.
OK, the thing is that even on sane distros, if you don't tinker them, out of the box, they have less battery life than on Windows on many machines. Out of the box Linux is just not that great with battery life.
Ships with Linux, some good marketing. I think PopOS! has lost the thread on why they exist, in that it started as an 'it just works' version of linux, and it seems to be managed as yet another enthusiast grade linux. It doesn't take much time over at r/popos to see this sentiment spelled out.
I'm not leaving the linux ecosystem, but I can tell you i'd be shocked if I go with either Framework again. Majorly disappointed for what should have been a top tier system when I bought it. I'm on the fence about PopOS. I need an OS that works out of the gate and doesn't break things like audio and bluetooth down the road (both of which are borked in the current version).
Idk. Hard time to be committed to FOSS, but the options aren't better.
Wow that’s horrible. I’ve got a 7 year old MacBook with a battery that needs servicing and I can still get nearly 3 hours out of that, and that’s running IntelliJ
"It's no use having 9hrs battery life if your CPU runs at 800Mhz."
800MHz would be more than enough processing power for most things I do. Just about virtually everything we do now, we were doing when 400MHz Celerons existed.
I have purposely configured my laptop with a maximum cpu performance target of 30% when on battery. No more fan noise, much longer battery life, performance difference is barely noticable (except in tasks like gaming and video transcoding which I don't do on battery)
Uh, I wouldn't consider that to be "supporting Linux" then. On a laptop - which isn't marketed as supporting anything other than Windows 11 - that has similar (but higher spec) hardware than the 12th gen framework I see anywhere between 8 to 20+ hours of battery life, greatly depending on load - largely equivalent to what it does running Windows.
The framework laptop would also seem to suffer from using user-replaceable DDR4 instead of, say, LPDDR5 like 12th gen compatriots generally do (higher performance, less power).
Does that laptop support Linux? If not, I'd expect a key reason is simple; it likely is not using all of the power saving functionality supported by the laptop. This might include things like S0ix, throttling, proper sleep states, etc. There's a lot of factors going in, and I think by and large it is not actually an endemic issue with Linux itself. Consider for example that x86 Chromebooks have no issue fully exploiting modern x86 power saving features and getting good battery life.
It does not. I use some extra software to try and improve that, which helps, but it also means the laptop is noticably laggy on battery. But you're right that is likely part of the equation. I don't think it's the whole story though, I see other people complaining of wise than Windows battery life on laptops that do support Linux.
I've personally sworn off discrete GPUs in laptops entirely. My direct and observational experience over a couple decades has been that they cause something like half the major problems in laptops, despite not being present in all of them. Your odds of not having any serious problems over, say, a five-year laptop lifespan are dramatically lower without a discrete GPU.
[EDIT] And that's even true for Apple laptops, IME.
The thing is, there aren't really that many laptops designed to run Linux. Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later. Sure, this feels like a cop-out and is not really of much aid to anybody, but it's only fair to note. Generally, I do not have dramatically worse battery life on Linux vs Windows, but I also did stop buying laptops with NVIDIA graphics. (Irrespective of Linux, these have given me tons of trouble. Even on Windows, external displays were a painful experience on my Thinkpad P52 no matter what mux settings were set in firmware. I guess it works out OK since NVIDIA on Linux is far from ideal at the moment.)
> Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later.
System76 does get complete hardware specs from the chipset manufacturer, though, and their cooperation in porting an open-source firmware to the motherboard. They run Coreboot instead of the proprietary OEM UEFIs, and this has let them achieve some nice things in power management (including MacBook-like instant on from sleep and hibernation, for example) on some models.
I'm still excited for the first systems where they get to do the physical design as well, but their firmware work on their rebadged laptops is substantial and relevant to the power efficiency issue.
I haven't owned a System76 laptop personally, but I really like what they have done in theory. I've actually been waiting largely because I'm interested to see what they put out when they start fabbing their own laptops.
I agree! The desktops they've built themselves are wonderfully designed, if rather expensive. I'm looking forward to the first laptop they make where they designed the whole thing.
Suppose I want to reverse engineer all of my laptop's power saving features and write drivers for them or whatever it is that Linux needs to work properly. How do I begin? I managed to get as far as dumping ACPI DSDT but I couldn't figure out where to go from there.
I got all the extra USB features working. It should be possible to support everything else too. If I learn this I'll add support for all the laptops I buy in the future too.
Alienware? I suspect you have a dedicated graphics card?
Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough".
I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.
Probably an Optimus setup on the Windows side. It basically powers down the graphics card most of the time and switches to the lighter Intel graphics instead. Linux support for Optimus is poor and usually you end up having to choose either good battery life or good gaming performance.
I don't know about AMD but nvidia cards have a management interface that provides useful data like temperatures, load and wattage. AMD should have something similar.
I wrote a script to query that data and output it in a format compatible with i3status. In case you'd like to see how it works:
I'm pretty sure Intel `powertop` can tell you, but if it can't tell you directly you can measure the difference in power consumption depending on whether the dGPU is enabled in the BIOS.
For me it's the exact opposite: I can't get the Linux battery life on Windows without turning Windows down into a stutterfest. Windows is also noisy as hell.
It all comes down to driver support. If you manufacturer doesn't have proper drivers, your experience will suck. It says a lot about Lenovo that open source Linux drivers work better than their proprietary ones, but that probably comes with the territory if you combine Intel and Nvidia.
Well people are working on it. As a random example I recently stumbled upon the "lazy RCU" patch in Linux. RCU is of course the synchronization mechanism to have mutable shared data across threads where reads don't need mutexes. Did you know that Linux's answer to "how do know this shared pointer can safely be freed" is conceptually to schedule the current thread on every single CPU? That doesn't sound power efficient and it isn't.
Usually it's the fault of the Linux drivers. They don't correctly configure the various integrated peripherals to draw as little current as possible: the WiFi chip, the Bluetooth chipset, the webcam, or whatever random integrated USB peripheral you find on an average laptop.
This used to be the other way around. I worked for a laptop company (Winbook!) in the 90s and Windows 3.x and IIRC even (early) Windows 95 were largely oblivious to power management features. These laptops had no fan and the bottom of the case acted as a heatsink. (We would regularly get calls from customers complaining about damage to their tables/desks).
One thing I noticed almost immediately when running linux is that when I was just farting around learning the OS, the laptop would get stone cold. But when I did something large, like compile a kernel, while the laptop was actually on my lap I could physically feel the heat from the CPU start to leak through the case.
Is any serious money going into optimizing Linux battery life on laptops? Not that I know of. Since there's no money in Linux laptops as compared to Windows laptops, why is this surprising?
I find it much more damming that Apple smokes Windows in battery life even despite Microsoft having its own line of laptops (Surface) and having the money to pour into it vs Linux.
I can tell you that I can run Linux at ~3.5 Watts/hour ("normal" workflow - chiefly on documents) on my laptop: you should check what is draining your battery, because the issue on efficiency you see is not necessary at all.
I also have an Alienware and I had the same experience until I spent a lot of time tuning battery life, now I can get 7-9 hours of autonomy. If you want, I can share my setup with you to spare you the trouble.
This is not inherently the fault of Linux, but the lack of drivers or decent tuning/power management default by OEMs. I get 11 hours off my $300 Linux laptop, but it's a Chromebook that's supported by Google directly, and I assume its components were preselected and the kernel is tuned up the wazoo.
I used a dell xps with ubuntu/gnome for years that used to get me 7-10 hours of battery life as long as I turned wifi off and was working in sublime text. This was more than I got on windows, and more than my macbook got at the time
It's a pure resourcing issue. How many resources are allocated to improving linux desktop experience on laptops? A tiny fraction compared to Microsoft and Apple. Linux paid developers are usually focused on the server side. If next to nothing is invested in making it better then it doesn't get better.
I’ve given up on good battery life in Linux. Any time I ask I get the “it’s easy, just do all this ridiculously complex stuff” and then it doesn’t work anyways.
So now my battery is just a UPS. Which is actually kind of nice at times!
This is why I run Windows on my laptop and use WSL when I need a Linux shell. Linux either doesn't care about or can't properly implement all the power management functions the chipset supports
This is why I started using Pop. I saw something about better power saving and yeah, it has better defaults out of the box and I got better battery life.
Now if only everything else worked flawlessly out of the box.
In my case at least: because it was hard to find non-gamer laptops with fast CPUs. Turned out to be a moot point anyway because the thing throttles itself to uselessness after seconds under load despite three noisy fans.
You do know there are open and closed source drivers on Linux, right?
OEMs develop stuff for Linux as well, it's just that they don't have a lot of incentives to do it properly, since most of the user base is on another OS.
So no, it's not a hardware issue, the hardware is great. It's a software, business and culture issue that companies don't have incentives to develop consumer grade software for Linux and that Linux hasn't implemented proper performance/efficiently core support, proper egpu support, seamless hibrid graphics support, etc. Because all those tend to be stuff that the general consumer wants and not things servers would use.
I encourage you to explore more around what you say before disregarding other people's opinion with "nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff" when you yourself haven't even given it much thought, please.
You don't need to be so snarky either.
AMD has them beat on battery life too, Intel just keeps pushing up TDP to try to get perf back even though their node size is bigger and their fab tech is behind. It looks good on paper to call this a "14-core laptop" too but really it's more like an 8-core with a 6-core co-processor.
I like this in general, but $2400 + $100 shipping for an i7-12700H / 32GB DDR5 / 2TB 980 Pro / non-OLED display is a bit high. I'm personally waiting for this Vivobook Pro 16x to drop later this year: https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-...
- Ryzen 9 6900HX (8-core / 4.9Ghz)
- RTX 3060 / 6GB GDDR6
- Choice between 4K/60 OLED or 3200x2000/120 OLED, both with >=550nits and TUV cert
- 2x NVMe slots so 8TB max SSD?
- 90whr battery
- The current model is $1650 / free shipping on Amazon so expected pricing is the same as it replaces that model (current: M7600RE-XB99, new: M7601)
For $2400 you can get a ProArt Studiobook H5600QR-XB99 with Ryzen 9 5900HX | 64GB | 2TB | RTX 3070 or for $2200 (on sale right now) a Razer Blade 14 with 6900HX |RTX 3070 Ti| 14" QHD 165Hz | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB, so those are what this is competing with, and those others come with Windows licenses too (it looks like the Vivobook MIGHT be available without an OS, but no word on what configurations offer that).
I see it more as what's possible when you have complete control of the hardware and software stack. I'll never happily enter Apple's walled garden again but I do see the allure. You get a lot when you trade away your freedom with Apple.
Asahi Linux has way better battery performance than any typical x86 laptop almost entirely because of the M1 chip itself [1].
Apparently part of the genius of the chip is that they baked a large chunk of the power management logic into the chip itself.
I think Linux has work it could do to be more efficient, but really we should just be mad at Intel/AMD for not doing what Apple did years ago. They never even offered an option for those willing to sacrifice compatibility. And now they're going to start looking the entire portable electronics market (little bit hyperbole, but I don't see my self buying any new computer that isn't an M1 something for a long time especially as Asahi Linux is making such good progress and I can use Linux on whatever Apple releases in the future).
It seems that we're not getting anything close to the M1.
I'll stick to second-hand thinkpads for now, but I'd really like to have a thinkpad with some ARM resembling M1.
We had a good shot with frame.work but it seems nobody is going to make other boards nor are keyboards really replaceable with thinkpad-like keyboards, so the swappable parts concept falls very short for now.
I agree that X13s looks underpowered comparing to Apple's laptops, but from my understanding of reviews - it's working machine, not a proof of concept of WoA style gimmick
Some of it's the software being much better. See also: Android vs. iOS battery life. Android's gotten a little better over the years (for a good long while the difference was comically huge) but it's still the case that you need higher specs and a bigger battery to achieve similar apparent responsiveness and battery life with Android. And that's despite iOS bloating pretty badly over the last half-dozen versions.
Or see what happens when you use Chrome or Firefox instead of Safari on a MacBook. One of these three vendors plainly cares a lot about battery life. The other two do not care as much.
To be fair, one of these vendors has also access to undocumented APIs that the others need to discover and reverse engineer to level the playing field:
Yes, thank you for this stunningly original comment. Nobody in the history of the App Store has ever dealt with this block, and this entire chain is definitely not about macOS specifically - which doesn't require using the app store.
By breaking background services more and more with every release. By doing less, your battery lasts longer, but for what if you want to make use of that battery? (I'm an Android user because iOS is simply not an option for tinkering, but I am sour about the breakage with every version.)
It's not just with Intel. Apple has 2 years on Qualcomm as well as their phones also have significantly smaller batteries compared to their Android counterparts.
My Dell Latitude 7490, 16GB DDR4 with i7-8650U, 60Wh battery, gets very good battery life under Devuan, 7 hours+ I think with my usage. My belief is that it varies between Linux distributions a great deal.
I don’t know, just the other day I saw someone warning against falling for M1/M2 for StableDiffusion inference(people buy new computers to run SD apparently!), claiming that same code take two orders of magnitude longer on M1/M2 against a 3080.
So maybe an M1/M2 Air isn’t faster than Intel(+NVIDIA) machine at TDP, maybe it’s magnificent that it’s only 100 times slower than a proper desktop, maybe it is still a lightweight ARM laptop, just (salivatingly) nice ones.
Likely not the x86 chip lineup. The problem is also in the software.
Apple tightly controls both software and hardware, and major Apple-provided software, such as Safari, is specifically optimized. Run Firefox on an M1, and see how much more battery it eats with the same tabs open.
Hence an Apple-only laptop has a spectacular battery life, which is reported. With real-world non-Apple software it could be a bit different, even though M1 CPU is really more energy-efficient than a mobile x86 CPU.
It's always the same story.
Intel makes the chip, other people makes the software that runs on it.
Apple makes both.
On the better permormance, I have yet to see.
This laptop drives 4 external displays, M1 or M2 can do the same?
Probably the gpu's fault as well, I have to restart my laptop if I want the gpu turned off or on. With it on l and barely using it, I get an extra 11-15W of power usage .
Also I'm not sure how mature performance/efficiency cores are supported on Linux right now.
I'm typing this on my 1 year old Tuxedo InfinityBook (S 14 Gen6, not the Pro).
Now I'm definitely spoiled by the Lenovo X1 series, but I'm not happy.
The hardware is a rebrand from clevo-computer.com - some minor spare parts can be had from there.
The system is VERY prone to overheating, the fan is noisy. They claim the fan noise is "not annoying" which is only true in the short term. I have opened up the bottom shell and I believe the fan recirculates a bit of hot air back into the case. This really is a limiting factor for me, I'm considering an alternate cooling solution.
The case had a minor chip in it within the first ten minutes out of the box (I don't know how that happened, I think it just pinged off by itself!). The palm-rests are starting to show dark spots.
My barrel jack power connector is loose, I have to hold it in with a rubber band. (I still have the usb-c port)
All the rubber feet at the bottom fell off quite some time ago, superglued them back on.
The (super compact) PSU started to whine, that was replaced under warranty - but is stated to be a consumable item!
Out of the box they have their own OS, which is a somewhat modified Ubuntu. My main driver is Debian and almost everything worked right out of the box - sometimes I got back (usb-boot) to their distro to validate things (see: support).
The firmware is more than okay for me; I managed to cross-compile their "control centre" to allow me to change performance/fan characteristics on the fly. The uefi updates work fine (boot from a stick), but they are undocumented.
The support is ... rigid. The first response is to boot their own distro and kernel. This is fair for a mass market product I guess, but I somehow hoped that specific questions would find their way proper Linux Gurus (tm).
There is a very cute penguin instead of a windows logo on the keyboard :-)
Not having owned one personally, the questionable quality of the engineering and QC of Clevo-based laptops has what has kept me away from them. Reviews for them are almost always some shade of "this is mediocre" or "this would be nice if not for X, Y, and Z".
While they still have a ways to go, I'm more hopeful for Framework since they do their own engineering, and I'm interested to see what system76 does in the self-designed laptop they're reportedly working on.
I've owned 2. One for 4+ years the other is 3 months old. They've been fine for me and I move them around a lot. the only issue is junk getting stuck in the fan and replacement was fairly easy. The hinged chipped when it hit the floor once (the plastic surrounding the hinge part.) Spare parts are readily available. I like Mat screens and they tend to have them.
The AMD cpu model I'm using for work is really quite good on power and fast (Ryzen 7 5700u).
One more nit-pick: the screen is polarised the wrong way. You can't see anything when wearing polarised sunglasses (those are always oriented so they filter out the polarisation of water puddles).
One of the things I really considered is that if nobody gives these "independent" Linux-focussed vendors a chance, then Linux-on-the-desktop will forever remain a non-factory option and a second-class citizen in support manners.
That's not the way the market works. How about vendors focus on delivering a quality product, with good hardware and software, proper QA and support, and fair prices? Hell, I'm sure many Linux users would be willing to pay a premium if all the other aspects are there.
Linux will never be a mainstream option with these low effort products.
What evidence? I don't think there's a machine that delivers on all those aspects, and makes Linux a first-class citizen.
Dell and Lenovo generally do a pretty good job, and those machines sell well, but I think the quality is still below what, say, Apple can deliver. Judging by the push to get Linux to run on Apple hardware, I'd say Linux enthusiasts are not only willing to pay a premium for a quality product, but willing to invest time and effort getting it to run well in a hostile and closed ecosystem.
So I think there's a big market opportunity for someone to deliver Apple quality hardware, that integrates well with open source software. Framework is probably at the frontlines in this regard.
> Judging by the push to get Linux to run on Apple hardware
.
That's still a very small subset of a very small market. I highly doubt it would be even remotely viable to develop a product comparable to M1/M2 Macs if you're targeting the Linux market. Even if you can get decent margins the scale is just no there. At best you can get some rebadged Windows laptops like HP Dev One.
Framework is probably an exception but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of those who bought it still use Windows
I have seen a lot of complaining sand saying that the Linux kit is too expensive. Even the stuff that is actually Linux kit (System76, maybe Tux). I'd be glad to be wrong, but I'd be surprised.
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: the smartest thing Apple ever did was keeping you from running OSX on Windows computers. Nobody buys a commodity PC, slaps OSX on it, and expects it to work as well or better than Windows. Yet this is how many do Linux.
Agree. For my software products, Linux was always the OS where people complain the most and then expect to pay the least. Mac users, on the other hand, tend to be much more willing to pay for a good experience.
Do 10 hours of battery life "while surfing the web with Wi-Fi" really strike anyone as a strong argument these days? I'm a bit uncertain. I got 9 hours of the same out of my 2017 MacBook Air's measly battery when it was new 5 years ago. I know for a fact I don't need 14 CPU cores to get my browsing habits satisified. This laptop is trying to be a "premium business workstation" by packing a CPU that's crazy powerful for laptop standards, but with only 10 hours of battery life "while surfing the web with Wi-Fi" - due to said workstation CPU choice - it's not gonna last even 3 hours doing the workstation type of stuff they're trying to market it for. What a gadget...
FWIW, 10 hours of battery life with a discrete GPU enabled is fairly unprecedented. Even the 16" Macbooks that shipped with discrete GPUs would struggle to sustain the CPU and GPU for 5 hours of parallel use.
Why would anyone, these days, need a discrete GPU for surfing the web? This detail, too, just like the CPU, falls short on the fact that making actual use of its power cuts battery time down to nothing. They should just market it for what it really is: a workstation laptop with 3 hours of battery life.
They also offer a version of this laptop without the discrete GPU if you need better battery life. There are still workloads that require local discrete GPU hardware though.
They did, and technically the underpinnings exist for you to do the same thing on Linux (Nvidia PRIME render offloading). Generally though, if you're a 3D creator or ML researcher I could definitely see this machine making a case for itself.
I can't imagine why a professional would train on a laptop. These days a lot of models need a minimum of 20GB vram to get reasonable speeds. Not to mention GPU prices have crashed. A lot of consumer motherboards can run 4 x 3090 for $800 each.
> Configure your InfinityBook Pro 14 optionally with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and turn your lightweight business laptop into an ultra-portable gaming console!
Why are so many Linux laptops NVIDIA? It know that we have the OS kernel + blob userspace option now, but it's still early days. My desktop is AMD, my laptop is NVIDIA, and the difference is night-and-day.
I would honestly have an IGPU in a laptop over NVIDIA, but even that option seems few and far between (this specific laptop being an exception).
With the proliferation of high wH usb-c power banks (for less than 100 bucks), I don't see the value in getting a computer that adds weight or bulk for battery life. Reason being by default then I get a thin and light laptop, or I can choose to extend my battery life by additionally lugging a power bank (or two) if I want.
Yes, this ad says this computer is thin, but if you compare it to a commodity ultrabook from dell/hp/apple, it looks much thicker.
Their website provides good enough information I believe:
- They only mention production in Germany. Their "Why Tuxedo" page[1] does seem to imply that they are building most of it themselves.
- They mention TuxedoOS for the same reason System76 mentions Pop_OS!: because they made it. I would expect it to work with any one of the OS included in their WebFAI[2] pretty well[3], which by the way I believe is actually sent with the laptop.
- Their FAQ might shed some light here[4] depending on where you live. It's pretty much the same with any brand I know; maybe you have had a different experience?
I find it misleading that they do not mention it, then. Something like "Our Clevo-based laptops are assembled by us [...]" would suffice. Laptops with Linux[1] does it, why not them?
How can they claim 16h of work - I own an Asus m16 with the same CPU and a 90Wh battery and after some tweaking my Ubuntu drains 9.xWh without touching anything ... With Firefox open it already consumes 12wH - so I guess I can be happy if I can get 6h of work done with one load and this laptop here can't do much better...
When I think of my E-Bike battery of ~400Wh that can keep going for ~100km (admittedly, with some assistance), I'm surprised this laptop can only go for 16h on that.
The energy required to move 80kg (me+bike) 25km is significant.
Well, look at the power outputs of bikers. 100 watts can probably get you to 15mph in flats / no headwinds. so that.... well, 400 watt-hours for 60 miles!
Meanwhile, gaming rigs are coming with kilowatt power supplies now, maybe even more.
Laptops try to be more efficient, yeah, but 100 watt-hours in sixteen hours is 6.25 watts sustained.
I'm a biker/endurance athlete to the point of completing several Iron-distance triathlons in the "happy to finish" division. So I have a general idea of 15-20mph wattage to speed.
I don't think I know enough to give a great answer.
The obvious is TSMC's "7nm" and iterative 6nm enables greater efficiency over "Intel 7." Beyond that, presumably there's some IPC advantage that means more work can be done with the same clocks and power draw.
It's odd, because 12th gen is quite performant and seems efficient, and yet somehow the battery life isn't very good.
I'm not sure about the AMD option, but I can speak to the Intel trade-offs. H-Series CPUs are designed to be the "laptop workhorse" at a TDP of about 47W - whereas most laptops built for battery life nowadays use U-Series CPUs with a TDP of 15-17W depending on the generation.
I have an X200 with a 9 cell battery, bought new a while ago, but I think 4h max is what I get, if I lower brightness and only run Emacs or so. How do you manage to run 10h? Does the X220 somehow use less?
Probably not a new oem battery? The OEM 9 Cell was really good. Also - definitely need to tune it down with powertop, you can suspend most of the stuff like usb only the fly, also using and ssd over hdd.
Though, to be fair, this one had an HDD originally and has an "HDAPS" system. It's a built in gyroscope that will park the head of the disk if it notices the laptop is in free fall. how silly and fantastic that is
Starlabs is the only alternative manufacturer that actually seems to make their own chassis, which in my opinion makes it the only thing comparable to a MacBook. No Clevo shell will come close.
I just configured one. The 14-core i7, 16 RAM, 1TB SSD and Linux with my local power cord are priced at €1739. That's pretty nice, considering that they probably sell a very low volume compared to the big players.
Huh, bought a paper magazine [1] on a whim today for the first time in IDK how long [2] and thought upon seeing this post's domain "that sounds familiar".
The backside of this magazine is a full-page ad for this exact laptop.
So? The T480 has a 24 Wh internal battery and a 72 Wh removable battery. I have 4 of the 72 Wh and an external charger. 55 hours of runtime. What's the big deal?
I work for a smartphone and found that tuning for the battery is hard, labor intensive work. And you also need awareness from the app developer whose apps do use the battery. Plus you need a lot of users to justify these efforts to be get paid. It's not technical superiority but more about the economy of scale. I bet Linux is much more energy efficient in datacenters than Windows because of this reason.
These laptops have a severe flaw that nobody seems to be speaking about.
The speakers point DOWNWARDS!
They're supposed to be pointing upwards, towards where your ears are supposed to be.
The downwards pointing speakers are a good fit for 2 in 1 laptops, that transform into tablets, as the most common usage of those is to fold them over, therefore pointing the speakers towards yourself.
But not LAPtops. These either sit on a desk, directing the sound towards plywood, or if you use them in bed, or on top of a blanket (when not working and using it as a personal device), sound getting muffled by the fabric.
I've tested ones of the tuxedo laptops we bough a while back that has the same flaw. The sound muffling is not that big, but it is noticeable, compared to my HP laptop with speakers next to the screen above the keyboard. And of course, compared to a macbook, it sounds horrible.
Bad speaker placement and bad speaker quality. I guess it's OK for work purposes but if you want to use it as a personal device that you want to enjoy during your past time, you, just like me, will get frustrated.
Same flaw all the Thinkpads have had for centuries now. Garbage speakers are the norm for laptops. The first time I heard one of the newer MacBooks speakers while I had a Thinkpad was eye opening.
Work gives me an elite book and while it’s much better than most, it’s still bad. The whole case resonates and adds noise and it runs some shitty software that uses 30% cpu to make it sound decent. Disabling that software brings it back to average laptop levels.
I had an older HP laptop where disabling their sound DSP (by Beats) also set the equalizer to min bass / max treble so you would say "wow, this Beats thing is so great".
I'm using a Slimbook executive 14 for about 1 month. It's the same chassis as the Tuxedo as far as I know. I bought it especially for running linux on bare metal (docker, kvm, linux tools).
Coming from Macbook I'm pretty happy with it. I got used very fast with KDE (I used it on desktop computer in the recent years from time to time). Touchpad it's great, keyboard is the same as on Macbook. Battery lasts about 5h now when programming (some Node.JS, compiling some Rust or Go services).
I had a 2016 Macbook Pro 15 with I7 and 16gbRAM, now it compiles a Rust service I'm working on in 1 minute compared to 6 minutes on the old laptop.
The laptop specs I'm having is the same as the Tuxedo and the same chassis: i7-12700H, 16gb Ram(updated it to 40gb myself), 512gb NvMe, 99wh Battery.
The only reason I wanted to get a macbook is because of its impressive batter life. I've been looking at Tuxedo laptops a while ago, but the battery durability was still a concern. Looks like this is not the case anymore, so will definitely consider buying this one soon.
I had a very poor experience buying from tuxedo and wouldn't recommend it. They shipped in a manner that triggered import duty (because they bundled all four into one shipment). Returning a defective laptop was impossible.
Tongfangs tend to be quite a bit better than Clevo also.
And such basic stupid mistake: the corner keys are easiest to hit and power key is not the most often key used (by me at least) - I expect INS and DEL at that place.. (power key can't be reprogramed).
I work on a laptop from the previous generation (Infinity Book Pro 14 Gen6) and I'm very happy with it. At first I had some doubts, but it ended up being a great "Linux" laptop.
I have to replace my aging xps 15 soon, anyone has any experience with those? It looks great on paper, how does screen and touchpad quality compare to an xps / macbook?
Ordered today actually. I've been torn between getting a 14" vs 16", since I am also replacing an old xps 15. But the extended battery life of the 14" is what finally convinced me.
The Starlab Starfighter also looks great, but I need a replacement laptop this year preferably.
MacBooks are the most basic form of a laptop. If you remove huge screen bezels, get rid of the cheap plastic case, unnecessary buttons, don’t add a bunch of stickers and logos everywhere, every laptop would look like a MacBook.
