Why is battery life on Linux so much worse even with PowerTop and TLP?
After fucking around with power settings I was still getting around 80% the battery life I was under windows.
I've tried Ubuntu, and some of its DE variants, Fedora MATE, Solus, Mint, and windows 10.
Somehow windows 10 was using more CPU and RAM but still giving better battery life.
Bumping for relevance.
80% is pretty good for a system that has to support a LOT more hardware, old and new, so has to be a lot more general and non-Intel specific in design (e.g. Linux). With modern laptops offering 5+ hours operation under any OS, WHO CARES?
Move on with your life.
>Battery life under windows 10
>Up to 5 hours
>Battery life on Linux
>Struggles to reach 4 hours under same conditions
Fug off kent
Because it's free.
Free shit is always shit.
Some hardware is like that, some is worse under Windows. Some is best under Android. Unless you can hack up drivers and stuff, that is unlikely to change. Replace hardware until it works.
You just install TLP and expect it to werk, same with PowerTOP, especially them both.
You install TLP, you read trough config, you tweak what you need, you get your battery life.
You install PowerTOP, you calibrate your system, see where problems are, you fix them.
If you install both of them, you make them work together, not conflict.
> you don't just install
fixd
If you have powertop installed, you should be able to see why.
I usually have to unplug the power and wait for a minute to get accurate results from powertop, but it is easy to see what is happening.
install gentoo
you can get better battery life than windows if you build a custom kernel with every power saving option enabled and unload modules for things you don't need in powertop
>Why is battery life on Linux so much worse even with PowerTop and TLP?
Because drivers aren't as polished as they are on Windows so you don't get all the power saving states the hardware supports.
Stuff like PCIe ASPM, I think Windows even reduces the USB poll rate, on my laptop in Windows it can even switch the LCD to 40Hz to save battery.
GPU acceleration in web browsers is mostly non existant meaning more CPU usage, stuff like window compositing is shit, desktop environments like Unity are heavier than Explorer which also means more CPU is used.
Not sure what CPU governor is used on you machine but ultimately the CPU spends less time in the most power saving state and it's forced to run at higher frequencies more often from what I've seen on my laptop.
>After fucking around with power settings I was still getting around 80% the battery life I was under windows.
That's actually good all things considered.
compile kernel from source
Why hasn't anyone published a laptop kennel with battery life in mind yet?
Tfw you have better battery life on linux
same here
We totally believe you
I've seen lots of people commenting the other way round. Probably just your particular setup.
It's device specific. I get 50% more battery life with Xfce than windows, but when I enable Compton I get identical battery life. And this is without installing TLP or anything else.
Huh. My laptop insta-dies without TLP, but with it I have as many hours, as in windows.
3D acceleration is supposed to save power, not the other way around.
i dont know man, but try to cool laptop with thermal throtling. I have batttery profile to turn down clocks for 10% (new max clock) and than turn off cpu fan (use integrated graphics) and regulate cpu clock based on temp. I get 7-8h
I just disable turbo when I'm on battery.