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> reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings

With the default settings being the key there. I had the exact same laptop and was able to get idle power down under 3W.

But to your point, that's a fair amount of friction for someone that understands all the moving points. It's insurmountable for the average user.

Would you mind sharing some of the settings you changed there?

Power/battery tuning differing between manufacturers, models, and even specific SKUs within models is perhaps the greatest hurdle to be overcome. It makes baking those settings into distros by default impractical and means there isn’t an easy string of commands that anybody can run to improve battery life on their Linux laptop.

One thing that bit me, was trying to get a trackpad working on a xxx-xx17-xxx model (17 for 17" display)... out of a lark, I tried searching for xxx-xx15-xxx and found the answer... I added a comment on the 17" model number to help anyone else that may not have otherwise seen the page. It was adding a few options to the boot loader that fixed it.

I've also seen issues with wifi drivers, but those are usually fixed booting up wired with a widely supported USB to ethernet dongle, not too bad, but still annoying.

For me, that is about it for my biggest issues, aside from getting an RX 5700 at launch, where the drivers didn't stabilize until the next LTS releases (about 6 months later). I'd run alpha/beta kernels, which generally worked, and even tried Arch (btw) and both I got a black screen after updates. I went back to windows for a while, and then switched my main boot back to linux and haven't looked back after the Ads in start menu search results on my Windows Insiders install.

For the most part, I've had very few issues in general, and only on initial setup. I've mostly used PopOS, and been exceedingly happy with it.

I'm not a laptop user so I alas never consider these things in my needs, but I imagine "Year of the Desktop" will be followed up with "Year of the Laptop"

For me the "Year of the Laptop" happened ages ago. Everything from old clunkers to a relatively modern HP Elitebook 840 G6... install Fedora, done. I think the fingerprint reader might be tough, and Bluetooth on Linux is truly a sad state of affairs. But everything else works out of the box, and that includes suspend/resume and other power management, the special keys, Wifi and so on. WebGL just works, no need to tweak a whitelist, and battery life is on par with when the thing was running Windows 10. With SSD, and a fan that hardly runs in light use, the Elitebook is a sweet Linux machine.

I even use it on the Displaylink type USB-C dock that my current work laptop came with. Installing the Displaylink driver was a bit of "old school Linux" since the installer was Ubuntu only. But not too traumatic, and dock/undock also works perfectly.

For whatever it’s worth, newer Intel wifi/bluetooth chipsets (e.g. AX200 or AX210) have consistently worked very well for me under Linux. If your EliteBook has a socketed wifi/BT card, it might be worth buying an Intel card (they’re dirt cheap) and installing it.

My issue with battery life isn’t getting it to match what it is under Windows, but that x86 ultraportables tend to have disappointing battery life under either OS. Linux doesn’t make it worse but doesn’t fix it either.

The existing (M.2) wifi/bluetooth module works just fine. My issue with bluetooth on Linux is that it's never been able to pass this testcase: Use a bluetooth headset as an audio I/O device. Repeatedly over disconnects/reconnects. For the past few years, it works when you first configure it - beautifully, you can choose your codec and so on - but soon stops doing so even if unpaired and re-paired. Maybe "the year of bluetooth" on Linux has arrived and I've just not tried lately.

I'm with you there; simply so bad experience w/BT. And, it often worked at first OS install but then degraded through kernel, BlueZ, and interface updates until it was unusable. Until recently, when it has been solid enough through most? Fedora 39 and now into 40, though I've found at times the config gets confused, forcing me to delete and re-add the device, sometimes manually, forcibly. But still, been solid enough for my daily use mouse and HD-Aptx audio (among others, all while crossing my fingers as 40 ages).

Wonder whether you've ever experienced this problem: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709 (spurious wifi disconnects due to "beacon loss" on Intel cards, been open for 5 years). There were two good blog posts summarizing the situation around that bug but can't find them anymore.

It's been really annoying with my Intel wifi/bt CNVi card for years and there's a lot of people having similar problems...

Don’t think I’ve ever encountered this on either AX200 or AX210 cards.

this isn't true. you can install something like power-profiles-daemon and immediately see a large gain to battery life, without any additional configuration needed.

Just to be clear, I meant the default browser settings specifically (i.e. whitelisted / no hardware acceleration). I didn't do anything special to try to optimize the OS as a whole.

OTOH I was pleasantly surprised that all hardware generally worked, including even stuff like the fingerprint reader (so now I can use that to sudo in the terminal!). Although that did require spending some time in the console to enable it in PAM. I'd say that Linux runs great on that laptop overall, aside from battery life, which is not a big deal if you mostly use your laptop plugged in.

> but you still need to be careful with network cards, for example.

Funny you say that. A while back I reinstalled Windows on a new laptop (get rid of all the default installed garbage) and I couldn't connect wirelessly. Had to connect via ethernet and install and update everything just to have wireless work. I haven't installed Linux on it, but considering its a Broadcom card I don't exactly have high hopes of it working with only upstream drivers.

> Running on the same exact hardware - Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4 - the battery life was reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings (= no hardware acceleration in either browser). Manually enabling it means that test cannot complete at all because both browsers randomly crash.

Were you comparing this to Windows 11?

> Linux

What DE was this done on? Were you using any power-saving daemons (PPD, TLP, Powerdevil)? If not, I strongly recommend installing something like PPD (power-profiles-daemon) which requires 0 configuration out of the box, and retesting.