Will installing Linux in a low power Laptop Increase battery life substantially?

[theRatty]

Will it make the experience that much better? I have a laptop with a low-power I3 and I just need this laptop for taking notes in college. Ideally, I would like the battery to be a bit longer. Will Linux also still be able to track my battery level and be simple to understand and use efficiently?

[LloydLynx]

Some distros have terrible power management, so have great power management. I'd suggest PopOS. The makers of PopOS also manufacture laptops so they're inclined to make the battery life as good as possible. PopOS has some good power management tools built into the OS panel, and has TLP included which further improves power savings. 

[Applefreak]

16 hours ago, phatrattyy said:

Will it make the experience that much better? I have a laptop with a low-power I3 and I just need this laptop for taking notes in college. Ideally, I would like the battery to be a bit longer. Will Linux also still be able to track my battery level and be simple to understand and use efficiently?

So what laptop are we talking about here. Low power i3s have been around for a decade so you need to be more precise. Linux can be more power efficient in some ways but worse in others. The base OS is usually not the issue when it comes to battery life but the application you execute or have running in the background. Both OSes will have them and managing them is equally as painful. If you are skilled enough, you could compile all the applications to only fit your machine, that would make it more efficient but that task also would take days on a slow laptop and while you gain performance per watt efficiency you do rarely gain much battery life overall. For an older laptop running a base version of Debian would work quite well but if you feel at home with Windows and you don't have time to learn something new (other than your studies) running an older version of Windows like 7 would drain quite a bit less power than 10 and 11 do. Out of the box some Distros track battery life really well but none of them optimize background tasks to increase it that well. There are applications that will do that but then you are getting a bloated OS like Windows. 

[Arokan]

Just leavin my 2ct here:
Installed Debian on an older Lenovo Ideapad.
1h Battery Life on Windows

4h Battery Life on Debian

[Ralphred]

20 minutes ago, Arokan said:

Installed Debian on an older Lenovo Ideapad.

Debian is actually a really good idea, you can cut out the cruft by just not installing it, and only install the tools for power management you want.

I use an x220 Thinkpad and get about 7-8 hours out of it, I can't see it getting that battery life with useless nonsense running in the background.

I have it do that hibernate/sleep thing too, so it copies the running ram to disk on sleep, then if I don't wake it up within a certain time it just shuts down into "hibernate" mode - means I can just close the lid on a Friday, and on Monday morning it still has battery life.

[theRatty]

50 minutes ago, Ralphred said:

Debian is actually a really good idea, you can cut out the cruft by just not installing it, and only install the tools for power management you want.

I use an x220 Thinkpad and get about 7-8 hours out of it, I can't see it getting that battery life with useless nonsense running in the background.

I have it do that hibernate/sleep thing too, so it copies the running ram to disk on sleep, then if I don't wake it up within a certain time it just shuts down into "hibernate" mode - means I can just close the lid on a Friday, and on Monday morning it still has battery life.

I will try Debian. Will it be able to run chrome and log into my google accounts? Will it out of the box pick up my internal network card, display, and all other drivers? What is a good resource for Debian use? This laptop also takes an m.2 drive so ill just remove this drive and install a new drive to install debian.

[maplepants]

This comes with an absolutely massive "it depends". If the hardware is well supported, then you probably will see some improvements in battery life. But if the laptop has some one off SKU for the motherboard, wifi chipset, or something then it might not make a difference.

 

What will matter much more than your choice of OS is your battery health. If the laptop is old, and replacement batteries are still for sale getting one will probably do more than almost anything else you can do.

[Arokan]

Yeah, to be honest, I gave up the Webcam and proper BT for that. Found no fitting drivers.

But being able to use that thing for that extended amount of time is very much worth it.

[theRatty]

On 5/22/2023 at 1:06 AM, maplepants said:

This comes with an absolutely massive "it depends". If the hardware is well supported, then you probably will see some improvements in battery life. But if the laptop has some one off SKU for the motherboard, wifi chipset, or something then it might not make a difference.

 

What will matter much more than your choice of OS is your battery health. If the laptop is old, and replacement batteries are still for sale getting one will probably do more than almost anything else you can do.

All right, Ill just stick with win 11 then its not worth the time loss getting it running without issues for college.

[FSP]

17 hours ago, phatrattyy said:

All right, Ill just stick with win 11 then its not worth the time loss getting it running without issues for college.

You can quickly test this using a live bootable distro on an usb stick. For debian the live images are available here (for the testing branch, to get more recent software): https://cdimage.debian.org/images/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/ Use rufus or similar to put it on a usb stick with the correct settings. If you are unsure which of the Desktop environments you want I recommend using KDE or GNOME, though some of the others might be less resource intensive.

Usually most hardware is supported, if it is not very new. I'm running debian testing kde on a lenovo Ideapad and all hardware, execept the Infrared biometric unlock camera works.

[theRatty]

23 hours ago, FSP said:

You can quickly test this using a live bootable distro on an usb stick. For debian the live images are available here (for the testing branch, to get more recent software): https://cdimage.debian.org/images/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/ Use rufus or similar to put it on a usb stick with the correct settings. If you are unsure which of the Desktop environments you want I recommend using KDE or GNOME, though some of the others might be less resource intensive.

Usually most hardware is supported, if it is not very new. I'm running debian testing kde on a lenovo Ideapad and all hardware, execept the Infrared biometric unlock camera works.

Ok I gave it a go its a acer aspire five with a low power laptop 10th gen (I think) i3. All drivers successfully worked but battery life maybe increased by about 20 mins with a looping 4k video. overall not worth it and went back to win 11

[E-waste]

23 hours ago, phatrattyy said:

but battery life maybe increased by about 20 mins

What desktop were you using?  Default gnome, or KDE?  I really do still think it makes a difference.  I know it did in the kde 4.x but that is probably a poor example with how much improved KDE v5 is.

 

In Windows for battery power plan advanced settings, you can limit both minimum and maximum cpu percentage, which is actually changing the processor speed.

 

0% will set it to the slowest allowed speed, where 100% will be the fastest allowed speed.

 

Linux also has cpu-frequency tools or governers, which can offer similar changes.  Phoronix has a good write up of how the different modes affect performance vs battrery runtime.