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Comment by mrpdaemon | Hacker News Reader

It does take some tinkering to get things setup right, but on my Asus Zenbook UX32VD I do get ~5 hours of battery life for simple usage, which is the same as the advertised battery life with Windows. This is running Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest linux kernel (3.9.6 atm), laptop-mode, bbswitch to turn off the discrete graphics card, power saving mode on for the wifi card etc.

IMO its paramount to be running recent kernels, both for good battery life as well as compatibility with the latest hardware.

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Agreed. With just a bit of tweaking I have my x220 using around 8 watts with average use, getting 10+ hours. Windows only gets around 8 hours on the same system.

This looks like a post from years ago. I'm suspicious that this guy is just a windows apologist looking to spread FUD.

What kind of tweaking you suggest?

powertop[1] gives you some good suggestions. And the easiest "trick" of course: reduce screen brightness :)

[1]: https://01.org/powertop/

I bought Samsung's 900X and installed FreeBSD on it. I could tweak it and get 4+ hours of play on it. But it involved tweaking with the config params a lot and worrying what I'm about to run, will it have enough power, what settings to turn on, what to disable.

So yes, I'd like to have a good laptop, with a long battery life that supports open source/free software OSs but I'd also like some convenience too.

I have got an x200 too, and i am between 5 and 10 hours depending mainly on screen brightness and software run. I have no idea how much i'd get on windows, as i never used it on this hardware.

I have an IBM x60, x61 tablet and several recent Asus lappys, all had terrible battery life out of the box under several different distros. After fiddling they all had _better_ life but nowhere near what I got under xp 7 or 8.

It's great if the HN community can config their OSes to get every watt out of it, but the truth is the lay man doesn't know, doesn't care and doesn't want to know how to do that...

> It's great if the HN community can config their OSes to get every watt out of it, but the truth is the lay man doesn't know, doesn't care and doesn't want to know how to do that...

How is this even relevant? We are the HN community, right? Where are these lay men? I don't think the OP as targeted at lay men.

I'm starting to think all this talk of "the end user doesn't care" or "the lay man doesn't want to know" are all just euphemisms for "I want it to be easier for me".

Which is fine, but then just admit it, instead of hiding behind a hypothetical end-user.

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