Linux lowering battery life?

[MerkBertmern]

Well, Linux has already dominated the server market and the mobile market. Now all it has to do is reach it's... 3rd... target, the consumer PC market.

...uh-oh.

Gaben really doesn't intend to release the Steam Machine. oh noes.

 

He will....eventually....

 

we'll remember that at the day that he gabe into our demands...

[defrio]

Linux and laptop battery life has been frustrating for many distro developers. I can confirm that there is no published way to make Linux as battery efficient as Windows on the Core 2 Duo mobile platform. I've even built a Gentoo Linux that only used 12MB of ram with a 5 sec boot. It was stripped down and compiled to run for the chip. I threw every battery saving trick in the book at it (anything I could find in the Gentoo and Arch forums).

 

And still, Windows had better battery life. Hats off to Redmond.

[KemoKa]

They did a great job, but even windows don't have the best battery life it could have. Some websites compared Windows machines vs Macs and the difference between them was huge, where the biggest culprits are the unoptimized drivers and power management ICs.

The highest battery life I've ever seen on a mac is 12 hours. the highest I've ever seen on a windows machine was 22 hours of battery life (the Toshiba Dynabook Kira)

my own laptop has just the bog-standard 6-cell 4400mAh battery it came with. That gets 8 hours on a charge on an SSD. if I upgraded to the 9-cell, I'd be getting 12 hours.

On a standard-size, consumer grade AMD laptop.

[BuntzenB]

The highest battery life I've ever seen on a mac is 12 hours. the highest I've ever seen on a windows machine was 22 hours of battery life (the Toshiba Dynabook Kira)

my own laptop has just the bog-standard 6-cell 4400mAh battery it came with. That gets 8 hours on a charge on an SSD. if I upgraded to the 9-cell, I'd be getting 12 hours.

On a standard-size, consumer grade AMD laptop.

 

Lol my pooopy toshiba from like 5 years ago with its 5400 mAH battery gets only 4 to 5 hours on windows with a ssd (note: i can squeeze around 6 or 7 if i shut wifi off)

[HullZ]

Ok, ok, but that's not the common case. The highest battery life that I've ever seen was one of Thinkpad x240 with a 6-cell battery (20h), but most laptops are shipped with 3-cell batteries.

Oh lord how did you do that? I have a new thinkpad x201 and really like it so far. I wanted to try the new Ubuntu and installed it just for fun, I think its not too bad.

So I guess I am stuck with it now, but as usual the battery life sucks. I have a pretty damaged 6 cell  battery which says 60% of its healthy capacity. But it lasts like 2 to 3 hours, which is not what I want. I need to take the Laptop to uni without taking the charger with me. The fact that there are lots of thinkpads around and probably lots of chargers too is not the right solution

I activated the laptop-mode-tools and I activated all the options on powerman but that did not do too much. Any other tips?

I could change distro without any trouble, but I think on linux that does not change too much because its mainly the kernel.

[HullZ]

Saw that 20h battery with Windows 8

Just 2~3h battery is pretty insane to be using without a charger.

Some things that you can try:

-Appending the following grub command to your default one:

pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1

If you're interested in what those things means, check that link and the effect of them on some different machines: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_i915_power&num=1

-You can install thinkfan too, to control your fan better and reduce its power usage.

-You can try changing your default laptop mode tools configuration, like setting cpu to powersave, increase delay to write stuff to disk and many other things.

I read a few lines about this topic already and was advised to use powertop and laptop-mode-tools, which I did but even though some ppl on that forum got 100% battery improvement it did not do much for me. At best I am at windows 7 performance here, though I dont really know how long the battery would last with win7 because I got rid off it right away

Anyways, factory new  battery is on the way and I will report how that works for me.