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Comment by kakadu | Hacker News Reader

I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me.

I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop

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There are several reports of people getting 12+ hours out of a Lunar Lake based laptop running Linux. Still a ways away from the 20 Intel claims for them, but likely a more realistic scenario.

Intel claims Panther Lake will be even better, and we should be seeing results within days as there should be Panther Lake desktop released during CES this week.

Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making it harder for Linux by making it so much reverse engineering work to get everything to go into sleep mode!)

I don't think it's that per se, it's just apple has a lot of resources to optimise/test a relatively small amount of configurations.

The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.

Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).

The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.

Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.

This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.

The vertical integration is what makes for the small amount of configurations. The total count of OEMs they have to satisfy or work around is one.

How's battery life if you run Linux in a VM on Mac OS?

I am most familiar with Debian but only headless. What would be a good choice of desktop environment? I’m looking to switch over the only windows computer in my house to Linux, it is primarily used as a home theatre and gaming PC.

Desktop environments are a matter of taste, but since you asked, I like KDE Plasma. I think it would be pretty comfortable for someone coming from Windows.

It's not the default on Debian, but once you install it, you can choose it next time you log in.

https://wiki.debian.org/KDE#Installation

For media, I'd pick a distro that has the software you need. Most should work. I like Debian or CachyOS (Arch). Thr desktop environment is likely what will impact your media experience the most. I use Hyprland but wouldn't recommend it for a media desktop.

Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.

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