Online reviews say to expect under two hours from the x395 running zoom in windows.
I assume stuff like suspend/resume, webcam and audio work, since it’s a daily-driver.
(My only other question is whether I can have vs code yet, but that’s not related to the laptop.)
I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.
So maybe power drain is inherent in conferencing tooling? Is teams even utilising the hardware decode/encoding paths? When in a call Teams consistently consumes a full single core.
I don’t know Teams, but Zoom has to do some image processing (it has some face cleanup tech which is weird because everybody knows a programmer’s power-level is directly correlated to how disheveled and tired they look), and also some audio filtering (need to filter out keyboards).
But, I mean, Discord manages to do the latter for pretty cheap, and the former is stupid optional vanity stuff anyway.
The conclusion I come to is that Zoom is a badly written program that would never have seen the light of day if we weren’t suddenly launched into WFH around 2020. That program is like the third worst thing that happened that year.
With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel.
Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime...
Either way, not bad for a "museum" computer :)
If you've never played around with Alpine, check it out! You'll find the installer... very familiar!
Any electron app will be using a Linux build of the Chromium browser, whether this will run on a BSD variant will depend on how well any Linux emulation layer works, OpenBSD has removed their Linux emulation layer.