I installed Lubuntu 18.04 + the Cinnamon desktop environment on a new Lenovo Ideapad 320-15ABR. This is a 15 inch display laptop with 8GB ram and a 1 TB 5400 rpm drive. It has an AMD A12-9720P processor, Atheros A/C WIFI, integrated Radeon graphics, Bluetooth 4.1, and a DVD-RW drive.

Basically Lubuntu installs and works flawlessly on this laptop. The Cinnamon desktop works great too. However, battery performance is very poor. It comes with a 30 Whr battery pack that is fully drained in 2-3 hours of light web browsing with the display at full brightness. Battery performance isn't much better on LXDE than it is using Cinnamon. The battery performance is no better using Linux that it is in Windows 10 that the laptop comes installed with.

I monitored power use with powertop and played around with laptop-mode-tools and tlp for reducing power consumption. I think at best you might get 4 hours of use on a full battery, and that is assuming that you are indoors where the screen brightness can be turned way down.

I like the Linux performance on this laptop, but I hate the laptop itself because of the battery.

My complete review is on my blog:

https://linuxlaunch.com/content/inst...apad-320-15abr

Is the CPU clock frequency reduced?

2-3 hours, 4-5 with heavy savings (reduced brightness), sounds about right for a 30 WH battery and an AMD A12. That's a small battery, and the A12 isn't the most power efficient processor in the world.

Yep. The CPU frequency governor reports 1.4 GHz on battery, which is the lowest setting according to cpufreq-info. I guess Timothy Miller is right. It is just a small battery with a big screen. I don't think it is possible to squeeze much more time out of the battery. Too bad.

How is the battery performance with Windows? Three hours on a battery is pretty good!