[funkythings]

The only thing that is stopping me to jump to a linux laptop is battery life. MacOs is just optimised to a crazy extent. Nothing really comes close to the same battery performance if you don't want to get your hands dirty with tlp.

[juancampa]

I recently moved from a MBP2015 to a MateBook X Pro and what I like more is the battery life, I can work a full day without plugging it in (I work from coffee shops). One reason for the long battery life is the 15W CPUs in ultrabooks, as opposed to 45W in bigger laptops. Here are some things I did to boost my battery life (I get 7~10h)

- Undervolted the CPU (-100mV). - Using bumblebeed/bbswitch to switch between GPUs, I never use the discrete GPU but I'm glad it's there just in case. - Show power consumption (watts) on my status bar to keep an eye for power hungry websites - Using Arch so it doesn't have anything I don't need running out of the box. A bit harder to install and configure though. I'm actually not sure if this helps or not - Disabled Xorg compositor, yeah, I don't get window shadows and there's a weird flicker when I switch desktops but it gives me an extra 10~15% battery life.

There's also a utility called "powertop" that gives you stats about power consumption and a bunch of levers to improve it.

It took me a few days to set everything up but now I'm in love with the mobility.

[rawfan]

From what I heard, this is not true for the Dell XPS 13 and other new Notebooks that supposedly run well with Linux. I get almost 5 hours out of my decade-old Thinkpad T410 (original battery). My 2018 Macbook Pro 13" with touchbar only gets me through 2/3rds of the workday (older models or 15" work way longer). Apple put in smaller batteries and optimized their own (!) apps to compensate. You're pretty much forced to use Safari if your don't want even worse battery life.

[jammygit]

I find its all WiFi. On an xps 13 with ubuntu, I get 10-12 hours on low brightness without wifi, but often 4-6 otherwise with wifi. Its really nice for roadtrips.

[robocat]

I wonder whether that is causation or correlation?

AFAIK the WiFi hardware doesn't use much power itself, although I might guess that background protocol chitchat could cause CPU usage. I think that when I am usually using WiFi I am also usually using a browser that chews power.

[chadlavi]

Turning off wifi is probably just turning off your ability to do a lot of heavy processing as you interact with the internet, right?

[jandrese]

This is my thought. Turn off wifi and you're no longer running the cpu and memory monster that is a web browser.

But this is something Apple does right. My wife noticed that she can get around 50% more battery life out of her Macbook using Safari instead of Firefox. (7-8 hours instead of 4-5).

[fak3r]

> "get your hands dirty with tlp"

I always go with the defaults, so my hands get dirty by:

`apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw`

That's it - by default it starts, and is enabled to come up on boot. Works for me, and I far prefer Linux, even on my Macbook Air

[rbanffy]

I have the same feeling with my MacBooks. They are so perfectly tuned to the software they come with they are nearly unbeatable.

But nothing other than Linux will ever be installed on my other laptops. I moved away from Windows as my main OS in the early 2000's to never look back.

[xioxox]

I get 12+ hrs with my Lenovo Carbon X1 (6th gen). There is a necessary BIOS update for better Linux sleep behaviour, however.