Hacker News Reader

Comment by yonkshi | Hacker News Reader

How’s the Linux battery management for laptops? This and driver compatibility are usually my biggest concern. I remember 2/3 windows laptops I used were having trouble sleeping/waking up when lids were shut

View on HN

I switched from Windows to Linux on my work Dell and battery life is the same.

I go to standby on lid closed and shutdown at the end of the day. Bootup to login takes 20 seconds so I don't bother with hibernate.

The issue for me is that hibernate saves user state (desktop, apps, edit state), reboot doesn't. I expect a desktop session to live months.

IOW: Your solution may not suite all.

Clearing user state is one of the reasons I prefer reboots - it helps keep my desktop clean and tidy. I cannot imagine the mess that would arise if my session lived months. I use shutdown as a shortcut for "close all application I don't use right now"

If that's your preference, great.

But again the point is that presuming goals/preferences, or attributing them to all others (and no, OP didn't do that) scales poorly.

As with most workflow preferences, the details are highly internalised.

What's wrong with hibernating and suspending? It's been two months since I last rebooted my Linux laptop, I typically only do it when upgrading the kernel. I agree it would be nice to keep session state after a reboot, but it's a very minor annoyance. Some window managers such as i3, do at least let one persist window configurations.

Nothing, other than that it 1) may not work on all hardware and 2) slightly increases battery drain.

Suspend (to disk) can be slow on some hardware -- moreso than rebooting. Though it preserves state.

Linux has no trouble with hibernate/suspend, at least on my machine. It's just that I prefer to start from a clean state each day and don't want to be bothered with yesterday's clutter.

I also save downloads and small 'run once' experiments to /tmp, so booting the notebook is a good way to clean everything up.

To add another bullet to the reasons for reboot listed in the siblings, I prefer to poweroff in the evening because my disk is encrypted and I don't want the key lingering around in RAM when I don't need it. /me puts on more tinfoil

Linux 4.17 is apparently a big leap forward for laptop power management. I run it on a desktop, so I can't speak to it directly, but I've heard a number of folks singing its praises.

It depends on the model. For my XPS 15 with the bigger battery I can get up to 10 hours working on Python dev and checking out docs. But only when disabling the discrete Nvidia card, which is relatively straightforward[0] to do after having suffered setting up bumblebee.

0.https://github.com/khllkcm/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/scri...

Glad I'm not the only one having an awesome experience with Linux on the XPS 15 (a 9560 running Fedora in my case). Some of the stuff I've come across on the internet seems to imply that it's impossible to run Linux on this thing and I've had no issues at all!

I was just thinking about this today as I needed to conserve battery power on my xps 15 for an airplane trip. Thanks for reminding me to check out bumblebee.

I think it depends on the model. I run arch on a Thinkpad and the battery life is about what I expect given the battery size. CPU voltage and fan is modulated properly. No lid or sleep issues whatsoever.

It's been great, just stay away from the new Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th generation, Linux support is poor with lots of things that needs fixing.

But 5th generation had a smooth linux experience, I bet the same goes for most other laptops. I'm hoping 6th gen will be fixed in 6-12 months with newer kernels, etc. But at the moment it's quite broken.

No issues on my X250, everything worked out of the box with Fedora.

Battery life under Linux compared to Windows 10 seems slightly better - I guess it’s because I’m using MATE, so it’s a less resource hungry DE.

Stock Debian Stretch on my Lenovo works very well. Battery time estimation is dead on, suspend is very low power (days). You can set the lid shut behavior through the gnome admin tools.

Check it out!

I have found it to be remarkable over the last few years. I keep coming back to Debian although I've used OpenSuse Tumbleweed in recent times, and some other flavours before that.

With Debian, I've used a very old Dell Latitude (circa 2010, Core2Duo, DDR2, i3wm or XFCE) and newer Dell Inspiron (2017, i5 7th Gen, DDR4, full HD touchscreen display, KDE/XFCE+i3wm) and never had trouble with either sleep/wakeup or with wifi. Touch isn't as great as Windows, so it detects only "left click", not right click, zoom, etc. but I never use touch so it's something I can live with.

Incidentally, I installed Linux because the Windows 10 that came preinstalled had some hardware issue and the fan was always on, so I was getting around 1 hour of battery life. Switching to Tumbleweed (Linux 4.x at that time) gave me amazing battery life, around 5-6 hours. And when Debian 9 (kernel 4.x) got released, I quickly moved to it, and still get around 4-5 hours if I'm doing text editing, browsing and little bit of compiling.

In my experience running Linux in two laptops is that it tends to underestimate the battery duration but the battery lasts longer than with the original OS.

I'm using a Lenovo T440s and haven't noticed a significant difference in battery life between Debian and Windows.

I get around 10 hours with my Asus Zenbook UX430U.

My T480S running Pop!_OS is stellar in that department.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com