What's the best Linux Distro for Laptop battery savings/screen time?

[BaidDSB]

When not connected to charger, i just read PDF's, specifically on Adobe acrobat.  But windows 11 gives me 3.5 hours of screen time from 100-0. Energy saver on, 50% brightness and wifi/bluetooth off.

Will any Linux Distro help with increasing screen time? 

What about those TLP/auto-cpuconfig things? 

[Highchurch]

The smallest you can get away with, if reading PDFs is literally all you do and you still want a polished GUI maybe something like raspberry pi OS for desktop or puppylinux

[BaidDSB]

5 minutes ago, LloydLynx said:

Ubuntu and Fedora have battery saving optimizations built right in. But for most distros and most hardware, just installing TLP and using the default config is pretty good. How light weight a distro is doesn't matter for modern hardware. It's all about micromanaging all the devices like wireless, audio, and storage controllers, and what methods the kernel uses for frequency and thread management. This site by TLP explains the most major factors to saving on battery.

linux mint?

[wasab]

None of them. You don't use Linux, you get an arms windows laptop or a MacBook instead. 

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, wasab said:

None of them. You don't use Linux, you get an arms windows laptop or a MacBook instead. 

... he already has laptop

 

23 minutes ago, BaidDSB said:

When not connected to charger, i just read PDF's, specifically on Adobe acrobat.  But windows 11 gives me 3.5 hours of screen time from 100-0. Energy saver on, 50% brightness and wifi/bluetooth off.

Will any Linux Distro help with increasing screen time? 

What about those TLP/auto-cpuconfig things? 

difficult to say for sure, best to try and find out. You will likely get about the same battery life though

[wasab]

6 minutes ago, WereCat said:

... he already has laptop

 

difficult to say for sure, best to try and find out. You will likely get about the same battery life though

Nope, always worse battery life on Linux based on my experience. They use generic drivers for most of your peripheral which are never battery optimized. E.g. wifi cards not in sleep when unused, draining battery.

 

Get new laptop 

[Skiiwee29]

<-- Moved to Linux, macOS and Everything Not-Windows -->

 

Please ensure you're selecting the most appropriate subforum section and not just dumping into general discussion. 

[BaidDSB]

5 hours ago, Skiiwee29 said:

<-- Moved to Linux, macOS and Everything Not-Windows -->

 

Please ensure you're selecting the most appropriate subforum section and not just dumping into general discussion. 

Killed all the views this thread had...

[RollyShed]

Battery saving I've not needed to worry about.

 

However the question is why specifically wanting to use Adobe Reader on Linux Mint?

 

How to install Adobe Reader on Linux Mint 20.1?
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=378830

 

Would you have problems using any other PDF reader?

I use LibreOffice Draw for editing PDFs, edited 100s of them.

[BaidDSB]

4 hours ago, RollyShed said:

Battery saving I've not needed to worry about.

 

However the question is why specifically wanting to use Adobe Reader on Linux Mint?

 

How to install Adobe Reader on Linux Mint 20.1?
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=378830

 

Would you have problems using any other PDF reader?

I use LibreOffice Draw for editing PDFs, edited 100s of them.

im just used to it. it has that 2 pages side by side feature. do you know any linux specific PDF reader that can do that?

[RollyShed]

2 hours ago, BaidDSB said:

im just used to it. it has that 2 pages side by side feature. do you know any linux specific PDF reader that can do that?

I've just pulled up a PDF to view in Evince and set it to 2 pages using Dual setting. As that works, what about the default reader, Xreader? 

Yes it also has the dual page read option. It is probably better because in that mode it doesn't make the pages on the left go to dual as Evince does. In other words, takes up less not wanted room. The pages down the left can actually be closed leaving just the full two pages to view.

 

This means simply use the default PDF reader in Linux Mint...... FREE.

 

Draw sometimes has problems with some PDFs if not set out well and the script spreading off the page.

[RollyShed]

Further checking, the visual list of pages on the left can be closed with Evince and Xreader so there is little difference.

[CannyJogs]

I would say whatever distro you're already comfortable with AND a light DE. Lubuntu works great on low end hardware because Lxde consumes so little, so you can lead with that.

 

Other things in between that may affect battery life are the services running in the background. Compared to ubuntu / fedora, arch linux has less, so less CPU used between now and then. You can always monitor the consumption using tools like `powertop` or the gnome power statistics tool.

 

>  What about those TLP/auto-cpuconfig things?  

Sometimes it helps with distros that don't have proper power profiles. In ubuntu 24.04 with Gnome and the power saver mode, I get around 7hrs in my laptop which is around the same as in windows, where I think it excels, is that whenever I put to sleep the laptop it actually sleeps so battery through the days without charging actually last longer.

 

A workflow tip: from evince you can open a copy of the PDF with CTRL+N, then you can put side-by-side both windows and compare pages, which is useful when you have to jump around definitions or exercises in the same document.