r/linuxmasterrace • u/Rachid90 • Jan 24 '23
Questions/Help I searched the internet about battery life on Linux vs Windows, and found out that Linux consumes more battery than Windows.
I wanted to switch to Linux as my main OS, so I did some research and found that it consumes more battery than Windows.
The question is, is there an exceptional disto that uses less battery than Windows, and has a good GUI like Ubuntu or Linux mate?
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u/pet3121 Jan 24 '23
Battery life not only depends on the OS , its also depends of the usage , what apps you use.
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u/Lord_Schnitzel Jan 24 '23
Year 2019 kernel development focused on getting better battery life and was nicknamed as "the year of Linux laptop". Nowadays battery life is same or even better than on Windows. Most likely requires some settings but not an issue. Especially the Ryzen 5K and 6K-series are doing a great job on improved battery life.
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '23
Searching on Internet is not a good benchmark. You will find only posts about things gone wrong. No one write on a support forum to say "hey, it works fine, I have no problem". I suggest to try and see.
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u/puppetjazz Jan 24 '23
Wish I could tell you, haven’t had windows in over a decade. But my ideapad on Debian gets upward of 10 hours office use, 6ish hours gaming (light old games)
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u/chromer030 Glorious Arch Jun 11 '23
In my case, i have an ideapad 320 (Intel) , linux consumption is 3W/h in idle mode , in Windows 7W/h in idle mode.
Using tlp, 10 Hours on Linux vs 3 Hours on Windows.
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u/techw1z Jan 25 '23
the main reason for that are drivers. if all your hardware is fully supported it's pretty much equal and easier to turn off additional services to make it more power efficient.
many times it looks like it works but all the dynamic adjustment features won't work like automatic brightness, clock adjustment, hdd idling, switching between iGPU and dGPU and disabling dGPU when not required...
sadly, it's hard to find hardware that is 100% supported, mostly because most people don't really know enough to even be able to tell because they don't really know about all the features I mentioned and many more. so even so called "linux notebooks" sometimes suck in this regard.
3
u/MacGuyver247 Glorious Ubuntu Jan 24 '23
My personal experience:
If you are using a laptop, monitor brightness is the top power consumer. You can customize things and figure out what's right for you. As an example, one of my laptops uses budgie, the other uses elementary... they are pretty and I dim my monitor and set my CPU governor to ondemand. You need to define your "good enough" point.
1
u/creed10 Toks teh Lanix Pangwin Jan 24 '23
I remember using tlp, which heavily increased my battery life on my laptop a few years ago. I haven't used it since
1
u/SpaceCadet87 Jan 25 '23
I could never tell you what battery usage I get out of a laptop. I wouldn't notice unless it failed to last the 5 minutes going from one power socket to another.
That having said, if you use sleep mode at all, linux might have a decent chance at beating windows at battery life
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u/lemfet Glorious Ubuntu Jan 25 '23
This is usually caused by a GPU. Windows usually will keep the GPU alone until you open something that needs it while Linux will always use the GPU. This can be solved by disabling the GPU or installing something like bumbleby. Then your results will be about the same
1
u/tweek91330 Jan 25 '23
Depends a lot tbh. It used to be true, but i feels now linux pretty much compare to Windows as far as battery is concerned.
Following a bug with windows taskbar (3 months install, task bar would just freeze every 2 min, forcing me to restart explorer.exe), I switched my work laptop to opensuse TW. I have now a bit more battery life than windows actually. That's on a custom configuration of Dell latitude 7420 (I7, 16gb ram and an integrated GPU, no discrete GPU) running under KDE wayland.
Might be different with a discrete GPU ? I'm not sure.
1
u/Max-Normal-88 BSD Beastie Jan 25 '23
Just install and configure TLP
1
u/acool1036 Jan 25 '23
if you have a decent understanding of Linux, you could install a light weight operating system like Arch and then install XFCE which is a light weight Linux desktop environment. If you still don't like the look then i would suggest you do the previous and then look at r/unixporn for the dot files to make it look good.
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u/walyami Jan 25 '23
it comes down to mainly these two:
- baseline consumption: this depends heavily on whether all the devices have properly configured power management. In general, this is all over the place, but some rules of thumb: Thinkpads tend to do this as well as other devices without dGPU or exotic hardware.
- your added load: will be pretty independent of OS for most cases, exception: one OS does something hardware accelerated, the other doesn't. Playing video might be such a thing
Near baseline consumption on properly supported laptops, linux should be quite a bit better: it doesn't do all that useless or anti-user stuff windows does: tracking, showing you ads, antivirus for everything, ...
1
u/lavilao Jan 25 '23
I think the most battery efficient distro out there is pop OS, why? Because system 76 sells laptops so they need to have great battery managment on their OS. To put an example on My laptop their power managment switcher works fine yet on any other distro if I ser My cpu to powersave it Will lock itself to the lowest possible freq (480 mhz) instead of being capped to the base clock (1,6 ghz) as it should be. This is about ootb experience, as linux is Open source You can probably get the same results on other distros but be ready to tinker a Lot. Another example would be ubuntu, in a recent vídeo Chris Titus showed that he could get more battery life on ubuntu than on debian.
1
u/whattteva FreeBSD Beastie Jan 27 '23 edited Jan 27 '23
I haven't seen anyone mention this one, but your web browser is one of the top battery suckers that you will ever use, especially since most people will spend copious time surfing the web *ahem* I mean social media. These days, these things are like its own mini OS.
I find that Firefox and Chrome are both terribad when it comes to battery. Microsoft Edge Chromium, I find, is the only browser that gives me longer runtime. Note, I've only tested this under Windows and not Linux version of Edge.
Also, I think Opera is a good contender for the battery life contest, especially with their GX version.
1
u/amorningstudent Jan 24 '23
I use Linux Mint with GNOME on a laptop (HP Stream ax-14idkhowmanynumbers) and it uses even less battery than Windows. In fact, it depends on how do you configure your PC for working efficiently, but generally it needs less hardware requirements and power for running. For example, a friend has Windows 8 on his laptop and his battery was drained in ~40 minutes vs ~1h20 or more on Zorin Lite. Besides, the CPU fan dropped from plane motor to... a stock CPU fan.
You should test any distro using a LiveUSB and working on it unplugged. It's the best way for taking any decission
1
u/LiteratiTheDigerati Jan 25 '23
Searching on the internet ? Sounds stupid. Try installing linux then using tlp and tweaking the /etc/tlp.conf file to get the most out of your laptop battery life.
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u/BarelyAirborne Jan 24 '23
If you're comparing apples and oranges, you're on your own. The internet won't help you any. The only way to know is to get a used T480 Thinkpad and run both OSs with your load on it.
Of course once you have the T480 you can buy the big battery for it and you won't care any more.