Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanklazard | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, these are disappointing reviews ... specs and price look quite good.

I really want a company like this to succeed with Linux first laptops! Maybe System76 is closer to making it happen? I have really enjoyed pop!_os, so I’m considering one of their machines for my next laptop.

View on HN

I have a System76 laptop, a Gazelle 17-inch. See [0] for exact specs.

pop_os! has been fantastic, though it has some ways to go, particularly in the power management department. Overall, the biggest drawback is definitely the battery life. If you look around for System76 laptop reviews you'll see that battery life is a consistent issue. I'm able to get ~1.5-2 hours on integrated graphics, about 45 minutes using Nvidia graphics.

At first I thought it was just the battery/device itself, (the device is largely is a rebranded Clevo laptop with System76's firmware and other custom parts), so I installed Windows on the machine to see what kind of battery life I'd get under that. Windows was able to get ~6 hours with the same workflow (mostly browsing, streaming, email) and ~4 hours with the Nvidia graphics.

[0]: https://system76.com/guides/gaze14/17b

I have a system 76 oryx pro. I love it, though it’s big and heavy, it has 6 cores and a gpu that handles everything I through at it. Battery life is terrible, I could make it better by switching to the internal intel gpu (and sometimes I do) but it requires a reboot. For me it’s a portable workstation. I have an system 76 desktop too. It arrived dead, but support was able to point me to the card that came loose in shipping.

Pleasantly surprised at how low matenance the os is (pop os)

Anecdata, but I had a Dell xps 15 with discrete nvidia graphics. Similar numbers to yours. For my next laptop I got a Thinkpad X390 and this little 13" laptop gets about 4-6 hours on linux, without any tweaking.

They claim up to 17.6 hours in tech specs. Did you check your workflow with Windows? 4-6 hours is nice, but if you could get full work day with Windows, it doesn't look that impressive.

That is pretty drastic. What's the culprit for such a massive difference?

Linux power management has always been terrible. It's a server OS, all the big players develop for server first, and PM on laptops is an obscure and unsexy corner of the ecosystem.

TBH it's not even a Linux issue as much as a FOSS issue, pretty much any alternative ecosystem has the same problems.

Linux power management for laptops is mostly a hardware and OEM problem. Every system has at least a few components that don't follow spec for power management, and the OEMs ship their workarounds in Windows drivers rather than in the system firmware. And none of those issues are publicly documented, so Linux developers have to reverse-engineer what PM features are actually usable under Windows on a certain system rather than trust what the hardware and firmware declare support for.

I do not disagree, but that’s where the FOSS structural incentives tend to fail. WiFi chipsets have the same “institutional problems”, but everyone needs WiFi so enough hackers will pour over the problem and generally find decent solutions. That’s generally not the case for power management, because most people will be ok with keeping “the brick” connected most of the time. Every once in a while, this or that company will throw a bit of money at the problem and solve it for a few models, for a few months... and then we go back to square 1.

I don't think the lack of appropriate structural incentives has anything to do with FOSS. It's that Microsoft has a near-monopoly on operating systems, so it's easier for PC hardware vendors to work directly with just Microsoft to deal with problems, rather than publicly document their hardware errata for the benefit of multiple OS vendors.

This is no different for any other chipset under the sun, from the good ol' "winmodems" of the '90s to today. But some stuff gets fixed and some doesn't. Power management is one of those that "doesn't".

I’ve had the same experience. Ubuntu 18.04 and up on a Dell Inspiron. 2hrs Max. Always warm, fans on all the time.

Installed TLP and now I get 5hrs or more depending on workload. Usually more.

Seriously, just have a check of what the system is and install TLP if it’s a laptop. It’s 2020.

On Lenovo thinkpads like the x1 carbon I am able to get to get 4 to 5 hours of battery life on a charge. Not bad at all.

I guess that is the default experience with no tweaks? Any success with TLP?

> specs and price look quite good.

Do they? I saw Ryzen 3xxxU which are okay but not outstanding. It's the Ryzen 4xxxU which wipes the floor with everyone else: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html the Ryzen 7 4800U has seventy percent advantage in performance per watt over the best Intel. The top four CPUs in this list are all Ryzen 4xxxU. (Also, if we wanted to list CPUs for similar targets and just list the 15W ones, this list would look super sad for Intel.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com