[VariousPrograms]

As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world.

Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't be left in standby for too long or it drains to zero.

Meanwhile, it's been 10+ years since I've worried about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices, even my 3-5 year old ones. I can fall asleep with Youtube playing and it's still playing when I wake up. I'm certainly not here to dunk on Linux phones. I want one! But if someone willing to put forth above average effort to use these devices can't realistically daily drive them, who can?

[maheart]

>Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use?

What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.

[ttkari]

I have a Sony Xperia 10 III with SailfishOS and it easily does 48 hours on a charge when I'm not doing a lot of screen time. Also on days when I use it for tracking / navigation on 6-8 hour bicycle rides it easily lasts for the entire day and then some. I think this is not bad for a device that has been in daily use for almost three years and still has the original battery.

I'm running a couple of messenger clients and a web browser (Fennec under Android App Support as the native one is sadly a bit behind the times currently) all the time. The only thing I've noticed to eat a ton of battery is having wifi enabled when outside the range of my own networks, it seems the scanning the phone does in the background to look for known wifi networks is not energy efficient at all.

[poetaster]

I also have this setup and SFos on Gigaset GS5. Similar battery performance. I did a roadtrip last week with navigation (starting with about 90% battery) and after 5&1/2 hours navigation was down to 65% or therabouts. Works for me.

And, yes, I often turn off wifi. I never go over my Data limits and 4G/5G is much more efficient for some reason.

[nextos]

SailfishOS is quite efficient. On Sony devices, I experienced maybe 15% extra battery life compared to stock Android, which is quite good given that Sony ROMs are excellent. Sony is known for their Sony Open Devices Program.

[ux266478]

I genuinely think if Sony offered a Linux phone and didn't lock it down too bad, they could serve as the catalyst for the whole market. I don't think I would trust any other company at this point to execute the platonic "Linux phone" we need. The uncompromising vision on building a fantastic product for the technically minded make them an obvious choice.

[pabs3]

I get the impression they shut it down, but Sony had/have the Xperia Open Devices program. They were close to having their devices running purely on the mainline Linux kernel:

https://developer.sony.com/open-source

[j45]

Sony tries out so many different types of products too across their entire lineup. They have made some memorable handhelds over the years, even their eink readers were special.

[nextos]

True. Sony is a conglomerate, which explains their business strategy. Lots of divisions and groups operate independently and have little coordination.

[gloxkiqcza]

They also pulled a bait-and-switch with Linux on PS3...

[j45]

No doubt.

I was referring more to their variety of electronics in so many areas.

[bobthecowboy]

I've been considering this as my Android exit plan (as part of a slow rolling de-googling effort, even before the recent "sideloading" news). Are you using it as a daily driver? I'm sort of surprised it doesn't get brought up more.

[maheart]

Yes, I used SailfishOS as a daily driver since ~2014 until last year when I moved to the Furi FLX1. The FLX1 has been my daily driver since. SailfishOS is much more polished, but it's not fully FOSS, and it follows upstream much less closely. FLX1 is basically in-sync with Debian testing, with the exception of kernel.

[cenamus]

Are you able to run android apps aswell? Without whatsapp you're pretty much locked out from most communication around here...

[kuuchuu]

According to their FAQ (https://furilabs.com/faq/), yes

  > FuriOS allows for running apps inside a container running Android codenamed Andromeda. This container has complete integration with the host and makes all Android applications work like native applications

[maheart]

Yes, both (official) SailfishOS and FLX1 offer decent/good Android app support. Not every app will work, but when I have needed Android (rarely, for basic stuff), the applications have worked.

[poetaster]

Interesting. I had a poke at postmarket, which wasn't ready in comparison with SFOS. Would you say the FLX1 is at better stage in development than postmarket?

[fossman]

You're comparing a Linux OS (postmarketOS) to a device (FLX1). I think you meant to compare postmarketOS to FuriOS : )

FuriOS (and its base Droidian) are at a better stage of development for devices made to run Android using the old Android Linux kernel, whereas postmarketOS is better for devices made specifically for Linux, like the Liberty Phone, Pinephone, etc. Droidian will not even work on them.

[maheart]

I'm not familiar with postmarket, but I imagine it shares a lot of the same phosh+GNOME app ecosystem, in which case, the apps aren't in a better state.

In terms of polish and app/dev ecosystem, I feel SailfishOS still rules, but it's getting harder to justify using/development, with it's increasing divergence from upstream.

[Klonoar]

The only detractions on the software side that I ever see are about it being a “hack” via Hallium, but to be frank, the device actually ships and is usable today. Linux purists probably need to stop complaining.

It does seem like there’s been a backlog with the latest orders though - maybe due to tariff hell? I keep wanting to order but their forum has a few people being thrown for a loop on the order side, so…

[shaky-carrousel]

Why isn't there more information about Furi FLX1 in the internet? Looks like a nice phone.

[numpad0]

N hours of actual use, in isolation, is just the matter of calculating average power draw[W] by runtime[hr] and buying the battery with Wh figures comfortably bigger than that.

e.g. your device consumed 1 Watt on average, you wanted 8 hour runtime, then you need a battery with 8 Watt-hours, or 2,162.162162162162 mAh at 3.7V of capacity, before factoring in buffers of various kinds. But it's also roughly the datasheet nominal capacity of a single 18650 cell.

You don't worry about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices and you can fall asleep with YouTube playing and it's still playing when you wake up because manufacturers know consumers do that and optimize the phone to make that work. They probably reduce display brightness, cut powers to mics and P cores, ask 3M to make the pouch films 1% thinner so battery could be few more percent bigger inside, fudge battery gauges so you would be nudged correctly to have enough charge before you fall asleep, the list goes as far as your imagination could possibly go.

The fact that same behaviors don't happen on Linux devices, even with something like four of fresh 18650s, means the list ends before it begins. They probably don't do ANY power profiling AT ALL. I'm sure they don't do ANY environmental testing, either.

Would I accept that as a consumer? No. Would I if I was the manufacturer? ...

[sharperguy]

This is a big part of why Android was developed in the first place. The operating system and application architecture that makes sense on desktop just doesn't make sense on mobile. Despite the many problems Google's restrictive APIs which you are forced to use can cause for developers, they are also highly optimized for power usage.

[jeroenhd]

The architecture can work if enough smart people are put to work on it. That's how Apple managed to turn macOS into a mobile operating system.

I think UBPorts and Sailfish prove that Linux for phones is practical if you're willing to rely on Linux applications that stick to mobile friendly APIs.

You need to configure and compile your Linux kernel for aggressive power saving, of course. Seeing how Linux currently struggles to effectively do power management on laptops without S3 sleep, there's plenty of work to be done if you want to use it with a phone.

It's not just about app developers either, Qualcomm's modifications to the Linux kernel are public thanks to GPL but most phone kernel modifications haven't made it into the upstream kernel so far. Projects like postmarketOS are trying to make things better but it's not easy to port practical code that works into code that's acceptable for the maintainers of the broader Linux project.

[3036e4]

SailfishOS also came (at least back in the day of the first Jolla Phone and Tablet) with an excellent terminal app and built-in sshd that made it work great with pretty much every Linux command-line and TUI application (only exception was of course those with hardcoded minimum screen size support). Termux for Android is maybe half that good, not as well integrated, but still good enough that I use it every day, much more than I use other apps other than the browser.

[gf000]

But I mean, why not take the 100s of thousands of man-hours that went into making Android this very Linux-Kernel based mobile OS and build on top?

Will you be happy with xeyes and a terminal? Like, even a technically superior solution is completely useless without an ecosystem to make use of it, and desktop GTK/qt apps won't work nicely on mobile without actual porting. Let alone a technically significantly inferior one that is a misfit in this shape for mobile hardware.

[blueflow]

Android is also Linux, so Linux isn't the problem - its the userspace. In terms of wakeups, the systemd/dbus desktop architecture is the worst.

[jeroenhd]

UBports (the maintained fork of the dead Ubuntu Touch project) runs fine with systemd/upstart/wayland.

Hell, my watch runs Tizen and that's running a bog standard Wayland + PulseAudio + systemd setup: https://docs.tizen.org/platform/porting/system/#systemd

With the right kernel drivers, configuration, and tweaks, with a well-configured userland on top of that, you can run the "normal" Linux stack in a mobile device.

Getting applications to conform with an API that won't let them drain the battery in the background to make sure notifications don't arrive two seconds too late is much harder. Desktop applications don't really like being suspended/resumed the way mobile applications do.

[rolandog]

That's quite interesting. How would one go about making one's app or services suspend/resume friendly?

Are there well-known good practices?... Or, do they need to be rediscovered as they are perhaps proprietary know-how?

[gf000]

By making a soft and then a hard suspend the reality they have to abide by, or otherwise they are killed and users will think they are broken apps.

Mobile apps just had to "grow up" in this environment, plus they have proper APIs for this two-way communication between OS and the app. Android will just ask the app to save its state and then simply unload it from memory (after a while) - but this also makes perfect sense for the desktop scene, you also want to improve energy efficiency there. A spreadsheet app doesn't have to continuously run when it's in the background. You just have to add proper APIs and permissions so that apps can optionally ask for extra background work.

[gf000]

I would argue that the legacy OS and app architecture we have on desktop OSs doesn't make sense there, either.

It's a model that worked fine in multi-user setups where you ran a single executable, so that the security per user was meaningful, but today it just sucks.

Android is quite elegant in reusing the Linux kernel's permission system, but on a granularity that actually makes sense (apps are started as separate users, and they just elevated their concept of user a level higher).

[fragmede]

macOS grants processes permissions, eg terminal is allowed access to ~/Photos but Whatsapp is not. Seems like a decent evolution of things.

[Katzenmann]

Hi. I have a Google Pixel 3a running PostmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ and it holds up pretty well. My phone lost 20% today with light usage and will maybe lose 60% if I scroll social media a lot.

I was actually surprised it is this good. I reinstalled recently and before the reinstall I had much worse battery life (Maybe 8 hours with normal usage). I think it was because of Syncthing running in the background.

It is also possible to use s2idle suspend which will improve the battery life even more but you will not be able to receive calls during suspend (though that may also be fixed in the future)

[fsflover]

Did you know that you can replace the battery in Librem 5 and Pinephone on the go?

[fossman]

They are just like tiny laptops, so you can certainly shutdown and swap the battery.

[fsflover]

With Librem 5, you can even swap the battery without shutting down the phone if it's connected to the power.

[nicman23]

yeah there are lots of tablets and 2-1 with amd chips that can do 8 hours on light usage.

[poetaster]

With my, atypical maybe?, use, I get up to 2 days on a 4KmA battery (Gigaset GS5, SailfishOs). Sometimes I'm down to 1 day if I do social media scrolling.

[cranberryturkey]

My HP laptop lasts 2 hours running linux. My macbook air m4 lasts 12 hours.

[shaky-carrousel]

Your MacBook air has a team behind it ensuring it runs as efficiently as possible. Your HP laptop running linux has... you.

[cranberryturkey]

But I'm a good team.

[fossman]

Well, if enough of us paid Apple level prices to Linux vendors, we would have Apple level Linux laptops and phones eventually. Not fair to pay next to nothing and then compare Linux to Apple.

[type0]

apples to oranges