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Comment by polkadotted | Hacker News Reader

This is a blatant lie that needs to stop. I've been using linux exclusively on laptops for more than 10 years. The first 5 with the HP EliteBook like, currently with Lenovo X1 line.

On my current X1 Yoga 1st gen, I do regularly get almost 1.5x the uptime on battery compared to windows 10.

We got a batch of X1 Carbon 6th gen, which are "optimized for windows 10", where the S3 sleep state was replaced by the S0I3, which is OS-assisted. The X1 Yoga with S3 can both suspend and resume faster than windows 10, despite not having S0I3 (and has longer battery lifetime to booth).

And by fast I mean that by the time the lid is up, the OS is ready. By contrast, windows 10 seems to always shuffle for several seconds after resume, even on the carbon 6th gen.

So please...

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I am not sure if I would categorize it as a lie. I think it is unprecise and probably misleading. I have very little expertise on the subject but from my perspective, it is more like a driver/support problem. If everything is supported (e.g. some Laptops, but also Smartphones) Linux has quite a good energy footprint, but there seem to be many devices out there which do not have good support (at least out of the box).

One of the problems here is that power-draining can happen by different components. Quite popular are graphics chips, but other components can be part too. For example, a friend of mine has problems with his device waking up from s2idle during transport. That is not exactly what you would expect in such a discussion, but from a users perspective, he has less time to work with his device given his usage pattern.

For me, this isn't much of a problem as I prefer working on a desktop, but I wouldn't accuse someone of being a liar just because he had a bad experience with power consumption on Linux.

My wife just got the Carbon 6th gen. There is an ACPI patch to restore S3. See https://delta-xi.net/#056. Once you've got the patched dsdt.aml, I highly recommend not following their directions, and just loading the file in grub by creating /boot/grub/custom.cfg with the line:

acpi patched_dsdt.aml

This has the advantage of not requiring any manual intervention every time your kernel is updated. The downside is that if you try to dual boot W10, it will BSOD on boot with an ACPI error. To overcome this, take the original dsdt.aml and load it in a custom (not auto-probed) menu entry for windows. You can just clone the auto-probed line, and add before the chainloader line:

acpi old_dsdt.aml

I already did it, and I'm really glad I can do that since I have no use for S0I3 and I'd rather have the extended battery lifetime. However on windows there's no way to disable this sleep mode, and the laptop has consequently lasts way less when put to sleep in Windows 10, even compared to the 3rd edition (which we also have so that I can compare). How does this put linux in power management, huh?

Sadly, the 6th edition of the Carbon also runs waaay hotter than the 3rd, and I did notice occasional coil whine which was previously absent. When running normally the kernel writes regularly about thermal warnings. It seems that power and heat management is not well managed in this edition, and I see similar reports for the x1 yoga 3rd gen.

I get 6-8 hours out of my Zenbook with ArchLinux. Nowhere near the touted 9 hours of the specs, or the 12+ of the Macbook.

My system is exceptionally lean. I run bspwm and the radios are always off except WiFi. Still, I feel like I could get a lot more from this laptop. I cannot (and I certainly wouldn't want to) install Windows on dual boot to make a comparison though.

What distribution do you use?

Have you tried looking for offending processes with powertop?

How can you compare two different laptops? I'm comparing windows and linux on the same laptop.

I personally use debian unstable with a tiling window manager (awesomewm) without a specific DE. However, I generally setup Mint for all my colleagues on the same laptop lines, and there's one colleague running Arch. We all have very similar battery lifetimes.

Today on Linux Evangelism 101: using a single anecdotal experience as proof that something works right always.

Sure, however I really like to see what downvoters have to say. The "power management is bad" is pretty generic, isn't it?

High-end laptop lines (Dell, HP, Lenovo) have actually pretty good linux support, they are almost always intel i5+ cpus with integrated graphics which are all very similar. There is next to zero setup required in almost any case. This is known. The drivers are tried and tested. I've never experienced any random "power management issue". Suspend/resume/battery consumption/acpi is working perfectly fine. What else does qualify for "power managment"??

I've been supporting a team of 20+ people with these lines in a mixed environment, and linux since more than a decade was always basically plug and play.

There have been some quirks in some models, which generally required some tweaks in the kernel boot line, to fix issues with backlight tweaking.

> High-end laptop lines

Sure, but Linux really ought to shine on the low-end laptops.

Linux shines also on low-end laptops as long as you're still decent hardware. Nowdays it's still generally an intel core with integrated graphics, memory and I/O controller, so the result will be pretty much the same. Old, good laptops work even better than brand new editions of current laptop lines.

But this doesn't save you from crappy hardware, which is why this kind of argument is a non-starter for me. How well does current windows editions work on low-end crappy laptops that sell for the lowest tier? Not great. These laptops have plenty of little issues on windows as well.

Maybe better than linux, because the drivers have way more work-arounds than linux has.

Have you ever seen the internal linux quirks table to work around buggy and downright horrid hardware? That's what you get with those. If it works at all is thanks to the patience of people that put in the time to work those issues around. I frankly do not blame linux if it doesn't work well with such hardware.

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