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With the musl/busybox/OpenRC stack, Alpine is top notch when it comes to battery use. Just by switching from Debian to Alpine i doubled the battery lifetime on my Acer A114 from 8 to 20 hours. This includes moderate use.

"Can leave my charger at home" moment for me.

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Probably not a musl thing so much as a way less crap running in the background thing.

Systemd daemons and subsystems?

Could probably get similar improvements by using any distro with less "batteries included" than Debian. Though I'm not aware of any except Alpine which offer stable versions.

My Debian 12 VM has been up for 4 days, and Xorg clocked 5 hours of CPU activity in that time, but systemd clocked only 9.5 seconds, and its subsystems each less than that.

So I doubt if systemd and its subsystems are using much energy.

It doesn't seem likely to explain 20 vs 8 hours battery.

Its less the cpu usage, but more the frequency of wakeups.

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