[freedomben]

I have had both experiences. The base system for Linux will be great for battery life (has been ruthlessly optimized for power savings by the biggest companies in the world), but some of the desktop software on top will brutalize your battery.

I've experimented a lot (mainly on Fedora) and the biggest offenders are browsers, but also sometimes Gnome gets in a bad state and eats up a lot of CPU. It's often gjs eating CPU so it may be an app I'm leaving open or even an extension. I've tried to narrow it down but haven't fully figured it out yet.

But, if you keep only a small number of tabs open and close everything you aren't using, battery life on Linux can be really great.

[jklinger410]

> has been ruthlessly optimized for power savings by the biggest companies in the world

It has been ruthlessly optimized to save power for servers with greatly documented hardware structures.

It has not been optimized for Desktop OS, for Bluetooth, Sleep, WiFi, graphics card power saving etc.

I am a tab zero guy, for the record. I've been using computers since Windows 3, so I'm very sensitive towards intensive processes.

My wife can watch netflix on her (5 year old) Macbook for hours. I lose 13% battery life on one episode. I leave my laptop on sleep off the charger, and it is dead sleeping after a few hours. Linux users may hack their way to lower battery usage, but they still do not have it like Mac does.

You must simply leave it on the charger and turn it off when you are done. They are portable desktops.

[michaelmrose]

A big difference in battery life comes down to hardware acceleration in your browser which depending on hardware,browser, and version may not be enabled.

[serf]

eh, it's all ymmv.

i've clocked ~8 hours of media time with a T420s with an ultrabay battery and tlp/powertop reporting an average of 6-8w during the process. Regular battery + the extra ultrabay battery put the capacity up to about 7.7Ah; about the same range of battery capacity as a newish macbook pro.

a t420s is a very old core machine at this point. I would suspect the same conditions with a similar amount of battery with a modern processor could do a lot better; but i'm getting too old to sit in front of a screen for 8+ hours of media time, honestly -- and lately with USB-PD and power banks I have been skewing towards buying ultrabook style laptops and accessorizing via USB3 rather than with proprietary expansion slots.

I don't know what the media time on something like a laptop with an N100/linux + a powerbank, but I suspect it'd be quite a long time.

typo: meant 7.7aH