linux What linux distro has the best battery life for what you have?

[Diego Binder]

I have a very small battery on my laptop & i would like to know what linux distro has the best optimization.

[flibberdipper]

The only two distros I've gotten to work properly on my laptop are regular Ubuntu and Kubuntu, and Kubuntu has the lead by a fair amount. I'm sure Xubuntu would probably be a bit better, but it's also not exactly the best looking thing out there, even with themes (and that's coming from someone who used to swear by it).

[FluorescentGreen5]

1 minute ago, flibberdipper said:

The only two distros I've gotten to work properly on my laptop are regular Ubuntu and Kubuntu, and Kubuntu has the lead by a fair amount. I'm sure Xubuntu would probably be a bit better, but it's also not exactly the best looking thing out there, even with themes (and that's coming from someone who used to swear by it).

What about KDE Neon? Would like to know how this compares since it too is an Ubuntu based distro that uses Plasma, except it's also made by the same team as Plasma.

[flibberdipper]

2 minutes ago, FluorescentGreen5 said:

What about KDE Neon? Would like to know how this compares since it too is an Ubuntu based distro that uses Plasma, except it's also made by the same team as Plasma.

I can't imagine it'd be all that different. If I'm not mistaken, the biggest difference between Neon and Kubuntu is the fact that Neon uses LTS builds of Ubuntu.

[Diego Binder]

22 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

The only two distros I've gotten to work properly on my laptop are regular Ubuntu and Kubuntu, and Kubuntu has the lead by a fair amount. I'm sure Xubuntu would probably be a bit better, but it's also not exactly the best looking thing out there, even with themes (and that's coming from someone who used to swear by it).

Thx

[LloydLynx]

Fedora has been making optimizations for battery life, but it's not a very light distro and doesn't get you the best possible battery life in Linux. I found that TLP installed on my Debian laptop gets much better battery life than Fedora ever did, and the fan runs less. Just install TLP on any distro and you should get a noticeable improvement.

[10leej]

SO I use a system76 Lemur Pro which if a distro has a package of some kind for the system76-firmware and system76-power tools I can easily get 12+ hours of battery life since I also happen to run a very minimal instalation on my laptop with just a tiling window manager and lots of commandline tools.

 

That said, you can make any distro work with some kernel tweaking, TLP and such. If your trying to stretch out the battery life look into what Desktop your running, there's actually a pretty significant impact of me running a full Gnome desktop, vs a tiling window manager. I estimate it to be a 10-20% difference but honestly anything longer than 6 hours is more than enough for me since I'm used to running older stuff that was lucky to last 4 hours.

 

Really though I don't really use my laptop much since it's really there for my monthly D&D campaigns and the rare conference trip (which hasn't happenned since I got the laptop). I have a more than powerful enough desktop at home which handles 95% of my personal computing.