[dman]

Depends on the hardware and the amount of effort you put in. If you stick to purely Intel chips (cpu, gpu and wifi) if you spend the 5 minutes it takes to get powertop happy then you end up with equivalent battery life to windows. (Basing this on thinkpad t440 and thinkpad t450).

On my AMD APU laptop, I have been unable to get battery life to be similar to windows.

[Zagitta]

Sadly this isn't quite the case with skylake IGPU, there's a ton of issues with power management options rendering the system very unstable or down right unusable.

Also worth noting is that NVME ssd power management is flat out unsupported resulting in additional 3W power draw on DELL XPS 13 pcs out of the 6W that's currently possible with stable power options enabled.

[zbraniecki]

Just to put those words in context - I use Dell XPS 13 with Linux 4.7 and my power usage drops to 4.1 Watt discharge rate and holds an average of 6 W when I'm on average use.

That means that I usually have around 7-8 hours of battery on my average use, and if I'm in a battery-sensitive environment like a long flight, I can reduce screen brightness and turn off wifi and get up to 14 hours of battery.

Right at this moment I have Fx with 2 windows, 10 tabs each, half-brightness, wifi on, and I'm at 5.78 W, 87% battery with 9h 28m left estimated.

I believe Windows may have even better, and I see my NVMe not dropping to the lowest power saving state, but it's not that bad IMO :)

[igravious]

Which revision of the Dell XPS 13? Thanks in advance!

[zbraniecki]

The 2016 Skylake Developer Edition, with i5, FHD and 8GB ram. Works great with Ubuntu 16.04 and Gnome 3.

[voltagex_]

Thanks. Any mailing list threads / bugs I should follow for this? I haven't checked the state of Linux on the XPS 9350 since mjg59 posted that thing about everything being broken.

[dman]

I am treating Skylake as a generation of intel chips to completely avoid.

I do have a Surface pro 4 with a skylake chip in it and even Microsoft appears to have struggled with power management on that chip. The Skylake NUCs have also been plagued by multiple issues. I briefly looked into getting one, but the issues scared me away.

[chrisper]

Make sure you also checkout TLP since you have a Thinkpad.

[UncleSlacky]

TLP works on pretty much any brand of laptop these days. There are some Thinkpad-specific extras, but the core functionality is brand-agnostic.