Expect Longer Battery Life with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 | Hacker News Reader

Expect Longer Battery Life with Ubuntu Linux 12.04

pcworld.com

60 pointsnickolai17 comments

Anecdotally, I appear to get better battery life with Windows (and some vendor-specific additions) than with Ubuntu on my laptop.

It's great to hear this is an active area of development, as it's probably the biggest remaining factor in me choosing host OS.

It is quite true. A lot of hardware today require drivers (ah.. I remember days I hated software modems 'cos without drivers these were useless, and now this is normal). And most drivers are proprietary. And on top of it - often hardware is being customized by OEMs requiring even more spcialized drivers.. And of course, nobody bother with doing drivers for Linux...

This is a case with my new Dell Precision M6600. It have on-chip GPU and discrete GPU. I still trying to find a way to switch to integrated GPU. And this one of the areas Ubuntu 12.04 should fix (well. To be exact, not Ubuntu, but kernel included into this distribution).

Just from witching from external GPU to internal GPU I expect to bump battery-time to ~6 hours from current 3 hours.

I have the same anecdotal battery life on my i7 Asus, so I ran a semi-anecdotal experiment. I'd charge the battery, connect to wifi, unplug the battery, do nothing for 10 minutes, then see what the OS reports as the time left on the battery.

  Windows 7, pre-installed on the machine - 4 hours, 30 minutes
  Ubuntu 11.10, dual-booted on the hard drive - 1 hour, 48 minutes
  Ubuntu 12.04 alpha, booted off of a USB stick - 1 hour, 38 minutes

Hopefully 12.04 will get better.

Excellent. I'm still on 11.04 on the laptop atm. I installed 11.10 on the HTPC and it didn't seem to provide anything new that was especially useful. I think I'll give 12.04 a try in July after it's had a few months to bed in.

I blindly upgraded to 11.10 Xubuntu on both the latptop and work machine and have regretted it ever since. Not only did it not offer any new value, it have had stability issues that I never saw with 11.04.

This is why it's my policy to wait a few months after a release before upgrading. Gives them the chance to iron out the worse bugs, and for people to write about problems like battery life.

The problem is that you upgraded. I did the same and got the same result but a clean Xubuntu install works like a charm.

Possibly. I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 without a hitch and was hopeful that they hat sorted the standard upgrade issues. I personalize my installs so much that I really hate fresh loads, but I'll be doing only that in the future. Maybe I'll stick to long-term releases only.

I reply to that comment after two days, I don't know if you or anyone else will read this.

My rules of upgrade:

1. Keep your home folder in a separate partition.

2. Backup at least your system partition before upgrading using Remastersys [1]. It creates a live CD/DVD from your custom Debian/Ubuntu system.

3. If the upgrade fails, restore the old system or install the new version and copy/adapt your config files from the backup.

[1] http://remastersys.sourceforge.net/

Good to hear that canonical is addressing this.

I had complaining customers on my SatchBook. Battery life got worse with every release recently.

Why is this a canonical thing?

It seem to me to be a kernel thing.

That's right, but it's not only the kernel that uses power.

All of the solutions/fixes talked about in the article seem to be at the kernel level. Do you have evidence that Canonical is working on power savings with user-land processes?

It looks like Canonical are rolling out power-saving kernel patches pretty aggressively. It's up to the distro which kernel features to enable, especially when it comes to testing new ones.

I'm using an old Thinkpad x41 running Lubuntu 11.10. It has a new third party battery, 6 cell...the batt is now more than 1 year old now. I get well over 3 hours on a full charge. I'm pleased with this. Would be happy to put a future ubuntu on a future MacBook Air and get 6 hours of battery. That's about the only thing that might pry this x41 out of my hands.

I've been playing with the 3.2 kernels from the Ubuntu kernel PPA and there's a dramatic increase in battery life for me. I go from ~3.5 hours to ~6-6.5 on the same hardware. (It's a bit unstable though... I've had a couple of crash issues. But it's still a development kernel so that's to be expected.)

Hopefully this is true, I bought a Macbook because my older laptop with a new battery and Ubuntu lasted for less then an hour fully charged. There didn't seem to be any native power-management tools and all the solutions seemed overly complicated and hacky.

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