Dear all,

this is more general topic it has to do with laptops/netbooks and their power consumption. In the last years they have been many models with increased battery life 5-8 hours. I do not want to be model specific but these devices are sold with different names... ultrabooks, netbooks, laptops (whatever)


I am not quite sure though how well a linux distro can use such optimized hardware for increased battery life. Correct me if I am wrong but what I know/understand is that this power consumption is achieved only through specific drivers (i.e graphic card) and most of the time these are available only for windows.

What is your personal experience with battery duration in devices running linux?

Let' see what we will get

Alex

I don't have any devices with extra-long-life batteries, but generally the battery usage I've gotten with Linux has been within the specifications for the device. The one laptop that used to run Windows gets almost exactly the same battery life with Linux.

There are maybe three reasons for increased battery life.
One is bigger batteries.
Two is more and more complex monitoring of various parts. For example. If the system has in internal modem and the OS/power management detected that it was not being used, Then power would be removed from that section of the system. Same goes for other parts.
Lastly is better/smaller chips and better use of power. Great care has been taken on mobile systems to limit cpu and video display current usage. Two of the biggest. Still hard drives make a big difference when they go to ssd's.

I am quite sure I have read for guys that were saying that they had lower battery consumption because some feautures of their graphics cards were not supported....
I will try to dig out thesse post

A

It probably depends on the hardware. I have a lenovo i3 laptop with integrated intel graphics, and with little tweaks (added a few kernel boot options), I am able to achieve the (estimated) battery times close to those achieved under windows. My impression is that when actually doing something, I am not quite on par with the references but I am not sure if this is about worse linux drivers, other programs (like firefox or flash) or exaggerated claims.

'Optimus' laptops will have slightly better battery life with windows IF the user does fair amount of gaming or video watching. This is because the intel video chip in 'optimus' setups uses more power to decode video, and for games. However, the intel video chip will use less power than the nVidia GPU when being used for 'normal' desktop tasks.

With windows, using an optimus setup is easy and fairly seamless. All non-accelerated content on the desktop si rendered by the intel video chip, accelerated content will be rendered by the nVidia GPU can output to the intel video chip. With linux, optimus doesnt work like that, and it pretty much becomes a 'swtiching' technology. To use the nVidia GPU, you select it and reboot. To change back to the intel video chip, you select it and reboot.

So with linux, if you enable the nVidia GPU, batterylife will be shorter due to the extra power required for displaying the desktop with nVidia. If you enable the intel video chip, battery life will be shorter for anything that could properly use the nVidia GPU.

It will not make a huge difference AFAIK. You might get people saying it oes make a big difference, but those people are IMO either using the 'wrong' video chip, and/or they have made a minor mistake.......like not shutting off the nVidia GPU if they are using the intel video chip (with linux, unless the nVidia GPU is turned off it will continue to use power)