One of my favorite machines was the MacBook Air 11 (2012). This was a pure Intel machine, except for a mediocre Broadcom wireless card. With a few udev rules, I squeezed out the same battery performance from Linux I got from OS X, down to a few minutes of advantage in favor of Linux. And all this despite Safari being a marvel of energy efficiency.
The problem with Linux performance on laptops boils down to i) no energy tweaks by default and ii) poor device drivers due to the lack of manufacturer cooperation. If you pick a machine with well supported hardware and you are diligent with some udev rules, which are quite trivial to write thanks to powertop suggestions, performance can be very good.
I am getting a bit more than 10 hours from a cheap ThinkPad E14 Gen7, with a 64 Wh battery, and light coding use. That's less than a MacBook Air, where I would be getting around 13-14 hours, but it's not bad at all. The difference comes mainly from the cheap screen that is more power consuming and ARMs superior efficiency when idling.
But I prefer not to trade the convenience and openness of x86_64 plus NixOS for a bit more battery range. IMHO, the gap is not sufficiently wide to make a big difference in most usage scenarios.
The need to tweak that deeply just to get “baseline” performance really stings, though, particularly if you’re not already accustomed to having to do that kind of thing.
It’d be a gargantuan project, but there should probably be some kind of centralized, cross-distro repository for power configuration profiles that allows users to rate them with their hardware. Once a profile has been sufficiently user-verified and is well rated, distro installers could then automatically fetch and install the profile as a post-install step, making for a much more seamless and less fiddly experience for users.
While you are correct, for any user this is completely irrelevant, right? I have the choice between picking up an MBA or a different laptop. One comes with a reasonable expectation of battery life. The other is a gamble
> 40% battery for 4hrs of real work is better than pretty much any linux supported laptop I've ever used
Not sure what "real work" is for you, but I regularly get more than 12 hours of battery life on an old Chromebook running a Linux and the usual IDEs/dev tooling (in a Crostini VM). All the drivers just work, sleep has no detectable battery drain. It's not a workstation by any means, but dual core Intel's are great for Python/Go/TypeScript
Out of curiosity, does Google contribute the drivers for Chromebook hardware to Linux upstream or do they keep it for themselves? Could it be that they just choose the hardware that works very well out of box with Linux?
I have no idea if there's upstreaming, but the Chomium OS repo is open source so you could check.
I don't know if that would help the wider Linux laptop community, because Chromebook OEMs can only select from a small list of CPU & chipset hardware combinations blessed by Google
What's the bar here? My Thinkpad X270 gets about 16 hours under Ubuntu with swaywm.
If we really want to get pedantic, its internal battery means the external pack is hot-swappable, so I can actually get several days on a "single charge." Good machine for camping trips.
The problem with Linux performance on laptops boils down to i) no energy tweaks by default and ii) poor device drivers due to the lack of manufacturer cooperation. If you pick a machine with well supported hardware and you are diligent with some udev rules, which are quite trivial to write thanks to powertop suggestions, performance can be very good.
I am getting a bit more than 10 hours from a cheap ThinkPad E14 Gen7, with a 64 Wh battery, and light coding use. That's less than a MacBook Air, where I would be getting around 13-14 hours, but it's not bad at all. The difference comes mainly from the cheap screen that is more power consuming and ARMs superior efficiency when idling.
But I prefer not to trade the convenience and openness of x86_64 plus NixOS for a bit more battery range. IMHO, the gap is not sufficiently wide to make a big difference in most usage scenarios.