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Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

I find the battery life on my framework 13 really bad (ubuntu installed).

There's some issue where the battery drains fairly quickly in suspend which requires enabling "deep sleep" mode, but it still drains a lot faster than other laptops I've had.

And then the battery life in general isn't very good; I'd say ~2 hours at full brightness with some video streaming mixed in with normal browsing.

I wonder if that's the same experience other people have? And whether the 16 will have better battery life?

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In case you haven't seen, in April, Framework published an official Optimizing Ubuntu Battery Life guide that is quite useful: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/optimizing-ubuntu-bat...

If that doesn't help, I'd recommend reviewing some of the resources:

* Framework Forum Linux battery life tuning thread (300+ messages) https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...

* anarcat's Framework Battery Life and Power management testing: https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/framework-12th-gen/#battery...

* I also did a long review covering different ways of optimizing CPU performance, evaluating idle and near idle power consumption, various power-testing (including writing a suspend battery logging tool that people may find useful, etc): https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...

Super helpful, thanks!

So I have to read forums threads with 300+ messages in order to maybe improve the battery life. Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I'll just buy a macbook. 2-3 hours battery lifetime in 2023 is a sad sad joke. I'm sorry, but if this is the best this framework laptop company can come up with...

The 13th-gen Framework gets just under 12h on Windows 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuw-YpbFkkM - for Linux, battery life will be up to how your distro does power management. The Ubuntu guide I linked has a read time of 7 minutes. If a Macbook suits your needs, you should buy that, but I don't think the bad faith characterizations you've made are very helpful to anyone.

They also changed the HDMI and DP cards to draw less power: https://frame.work/blog/testing-the-battery-life-of-framewor...

The 13th gen apparently has dramatically better battery life, which is great since the battery life otherwise prevented me from buying one. They spent a lot of time optimizing it both in hardware and software.

Meanwhile the firmware update to improve battery life on the 12th gen has been in beta since last year :( I've held off on installing it since some of the bugs sound scary (breaking USB ports)

I find battery life with linux in general pretty poor. It also struggles achieve any kind of reasonable hibernate/suspend. I can throw my macbook into a bag and pull out a week later with just a small battery draw down. I have never had a linux laptop that would not be completely dead in that scenario.

I find my macbook (M1, Air) achieves really good battery life when I'm actively using it as my main computer (so including sleep/hibernate) but extremely poor when I'm not. For example if I turn my Macbook completely off and leave it for a month, the batteries drained completely.

I've had the similar experiences with a 2017 Macbook Air at my previous job. Over time it got worse to the point it'd be at 100% when it suspends at the end of the day and then when I was back at work the next morning there was a 50:50 chance it'd be completely flat. I eventually had to get into the habit of plugging in my Macbook in the morning for ~5mins before starting it up to ensure it didn't try and start on 0% battery and promptly shutdown. The same machine would last all day (i.e. charged to 100% first thing in the morning and then disconnected from power and used on battery the rest of the day) which seems to rule out battery capacity issues. YMMV.

If you set up hibernate, then it will not drain the battery at all, as hibernate is completely powered off (contents of RAM are written to disk and reloaded on startup).

I agree with you on suspend, though: even with "deep" sleep enabled ("s2idle" is garbage), I still lose about 20% overnight.

My KDE Slimbook with openSUSE does a great job. Comfortably lasts a whole workday, and the standby works fine, too.

> I can throw my macbook into a bag and pull out a week later with just a small battery draw down

Hmm, I can't with a Macbook Air M1. I lose maybe up to 10% a day.

When suspended, I see it appearing on the network a few times each hour. I can leave a process running in the background and see that it's getting a few seconds of cpu time each time this "suspended" mac wakes up to do whatever it is doing. There are no settings I can see for a deeper sleep and to stop it doing whatever it is doing. I think they check for updates and such.

Spending a ton of time on brittle power configuration in order to get from “bad” to “meh”, and suspend never quite working properly, is part of the experience of owning a linux laptop. That’s the way it’s always been.

Solutions include not caring, buying a mac, or buying windows and using WSL.

With windows you have the danger of not suspending or doing what my surfacebook does and just self heating -the gpu sometimes doesn’t get the sleep command, and just sits there burning power while the fan is shut down..easily hits 100C.

Lol, maybe try using a decent distribution like openSUSE then. I so far didn't have the slightest issue with my Slimbook

I've had suspend work perfectly using Debian on two separate Lenovo Thinkpads. No special config, just plain Debian works fine. Ironically I've had suspend issues on MacBooks. Even Windows isn't immune to suspend issues on the very same hardware Debian has zero issues with. YMMV.

Interesting that my ThinkPad can get 8 hours from stock Fedora.

Might not be as much as my work MacBook Pro, but definitely more pleasant to work with.

> I'd say ~2 hours at full brightness

Most laptops with high brightness monitors would leave you with about 2-3 hours of battery life... many laptops can hit 300-400 nits, some even more.

sRGB and BT709 declare the brightness of SDR white as 100 nits, and 100-120 is considered acceptable.

The rest of what you say sounds like your Ubuntu is misconfigured, which is common with Ubuntu installs. The fix is usually either changing a few files in /etc, or installing an entirely different distro that isn't user hostile.

I think you're way overestimating the power usage of modern displays. The Framework display (BOE095F) backlight based on my personal testing uses ~2.1W at 100% (440 nits) (this is as expected, you can look at datasheets on similar displays like https://datasheetspdf.com/pdf-file/1294460/BOE/NT156FHM-N41/... and the the Pbl on the specsheet).

The old Framework 13s have a 55Wh battery, so 2-3h would require 18.3-27.5W of average power consumption. For context, PL1 (max sustained power limit) of the 12th-gen CPUs are set to 30W in the Framework and when I tested last year, powerstat (calculated w/ ACPI battery info) reported that the laptop my 1260P Framework idles at is about 3.34W w/ backlight off, 4.01W @ 200 nits, and 5.46W @ 100% BL.

Huh.

I didn't realize displays had gotten this efficient. I remember when LED backlights were more efficient, but not efficient (huge leap over CCFL, obviously).

So yeah, sounds like the parent comment's Ubuntu is just grossly misconfigured, either out of the box, or merely a few things relevant to Intel Cove-era have to be manually flipped on/off.

I'd love to see if he can repeat it with any other distro, such as with SuSE, or Debian + task-laptop and KDE.

I'm running Fedora with the i5-1240p, but I can squeak out maybe 4.5hours max if I'm just in VS Code and don't have my brightness maxed out. With max brightness and Google meet running in Firefox, I barely get 2. And that's with the "Power Saver" profile enabled in GNOME.

I really love the machine otherwise, but I can't say I haven't considered just getting a Macbook Air (especially now that they have the 15").

On my 1240p I've gone 6 hours on 80% of the battery (the limit I set) coding in vim at a reasonable indoor brightness.

For me it's even worse. Being in a Google Meet with "level 1" blurring activated puts my battery life between 60-90 minutes. I don't know if it's Google Meets fault or bad battery management of the Frame.work or even the browser :/

Linux battery life is what sells so many MacBooks to developers.

And that's what I don't get. Especially with the developers I know, you're mostly having a desktop setup with a power supply. Or is the stereotype of most of the developers sitting in a Starbucks all day, every day, true?

Linux Desktop at desk, but MacBook for travel, couch, bathroom, backyard, in the car, on the train or plane.

Lots of places other than Starbucks I want a good battery life portable computer.

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