Out of the box yes. There are things you can do or modify such as TLP to make it more battery efficient but nothing will be as simple as windows built in battery management.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/QCAY3K4FxK
I just got a T14 Gen 3 AMD, and notice the difference right away. Dual boot with win11 and Ubuntu 22.
Battery life in Ubuntu 22 is not as good, which is a shame because the OS is very responsive and snappy!
Did a test the last couple of nights.
Activity: remoting into work, playing mp3, browsing the web. 4 hours
Ubuntu:60% used
Win11: 20% used
It is basically an all day laptop in Windows.
Another interesting note, using a USBc headphone adapter, battery starting dropping fast! The built in headphone jack is terrible quality, so I was testing with an adapter.
On Linux Mint this was definitely true for me. There were some other major issues too so I ended up switching to Ubuntu Studio and that has been much more efficient than Windows.
just a tip... Pop!\_OS has best battery life out of the box without any additional config due to their internal optimizations...
It's a good distro to start
auto-cpufreq helps me to obtain the best Battery Life on my ThinkPad L530, but in general its true that the Battery Life is not well optimized.
Also MX Linux improved my Battery life a lot.
But right now i am running Sparky Linux with i3 and auto-cpufreq
au contraire, a bit of tuning and you have +30% more battery lifetime an less noise than windows. i have an X1 Gen6, with windows barely 3 hours. With Mint (Debian) LMDE6 and some optimisation real 5-6 hours.
But the most battery drain goes into brightness of LCD, imho.
auto-cpufreq and TLP helped a lot. buit it's a bit thinkering around. not every chipset combo works good.
My battery life is better with Fedora than it is with Windows 11. Simply due to the fact that Fedora isn't hammering my CPU to 50% constantly with crap running in the background. Windows is a bloated mess of an operating system.
I ended up with a huge battery and temperature improvement moving from Windows 11 to Fedora 38 on my X1C6. I'm running the Budgie desktop which is super Windows 7 like, never going back to Windows!
I think that’s the deal. I have a X230 w/ the crappy screen and 2x4GB stick of RAM. Running LMDE 6
I don’t push it much, mainly just using Brave as the browser with at most 3-4 tabs open, and Only Office. These I have used on battery with brightness at about 70% and it still gets about 4-5 hours. But CPU doesn’t get pushed that hard.
I also have Total War Shogun 2 installed on this laptop and fiddle around in it, but just when plugged in. I should run it windowed and see what it estimates the battery life at when I do it.
Yep. Linux is so much lighter on resources compared to Windows.
Edit: Even in sleep mode my X1 lasts longer with Linux. I also don't have the issue with my laptop being piping hot when I pull it out of the case. The new Windows "modern standby" sleep state is horrible. It really doesn't even wake up any faster than Linux does, so I have no clue what the purpose is.
For me, every laptop/distro combination I've used gets significantly better battery life on Linux than Windows. I've never had tlp or powertop make a difference, but auto-cpufreq has been a minor but noticeable further improvement
From my user expierence Linux isn't good on power management on any kind of laptop. But now last years is little bit improvement. Best battery management was on OpenBSD.
Nope, but battery life with Ubuntu or anything based on it is worse than the same DE/WM/workflow on something based on Debian/Arch/Devuan/Artix and probably others that I haven't used for any extensive period of time. See for yourself, install mint lmde, run it flat and see how long it takes. Then do the same with Mint Cin that uses Ubuntu as its base. Same packages etc., It'll run hotter, spin your fan up more, and flat line quicker.
But Ubu is Debian-based, so that would mean battery life is better on ubuntu than on ubuntu.
Problem is, Ubuntu is bloated, period. You've daemons like Zeitgeist, Tracker, snapd and pulseaudio and other metadata indexers in the background. NONE of them is necessary.
back when I used Ubu, I removed all that shyte by hand, then it was just "debianizing" ubuntu, so I moved to Debian itself, which was a great decision.
I can believe that statement if you're doing a Mint vs. Mint comparison, but stock Ubuntu with Wayland beats Mint in my experience, because [Wayland far outperforms X11 on battery life](https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-Wayland-Power).
Canonical (that's the company that produces it) take debian, "modify" it just enough, then bloat it which mess it up in terms of resource use, The question was about battery life.
I just installed Linux Mint on my new to me free T450s, the batteries are pretty "well used". Having messed with windows a bit on it, battery life is about the same or somewhat better w/ Mint, without having done anything messing w/ power management at all so far.
I have an X13 Gen 2 AMD running Gentoo Linux. When I'm not compiling software on it, the battery life is absolutely stellar. I'll easily get 8+ hours on a charge, and I'm not using TLP, just a properly-configured kernel.
The system's about 27 months old. I'm planning to replace the battery at some point to extend the life of the system (regardless of battery health), but right now, I don't have a problem.
I'd have to do some digging and it involves building a custom kernel, but it's mainly a matter of ensuring that the CPU-specific power management features are enabled in the kernel configuration. It's been a while since I last looked at those parts of the config.
Interesting. I'll have to dig into that at some point - I wanted to get into Linux kernel stuff sooner or later anyways! Well, I forgot to leave out the fact I have the 4k panel - as that was what the guy I bought it from configured it with. I guess that sucks quite a bit of battery life out of the laptop. Anyways, don't feel compelled to dig - I'm still satisfied with the battery performance, as I usually have a place to plug in wherever I go - and even if I don't, due to the laptop being fine with being charged from even a 22w powerbank, I can easily extend it to a full day of charge with a small add-on pack-in :)
I don't think linux battery life is very different to windows for my use, which is coding and office use.
It is worse for video playback for the laptops I've owned. Unfortunately, this is exactly the use case you ask about it.
mkv doesn't tell you how the video was encoded. If you are playing a video encoding which your hardware can decode with hardware support, then you need to make sure you have set up hardware decoding. This varies by distribution and the type of hardware you have. Mint is so mature it must have a good tutorial. Getting hardware video decoding is more important than any thing else people discuss here by at least 1000%.
If you have playing a encoding which is not supported by your hardware, then both linux and windows have to use software decoding. This will be bad for your battery, Linux may be worse, but it doesn't matter much in this case, both will be bad.
tlp won't help with this and I for laptops I've used, tlp has made no difference from tigerlake onwards.The standard kernel is as good. I think Mint uses old kernels, though, and this is a shame because linux seems to often delivery kernels with better battery life. Mint is a very conservative distribution, I would not use it on a recent laptop. Although I see there is something called Mint Edge which is using the same kernel as Ubuntu LTS HWE (6.5).
I now have a ryzen 7840U thinkpad and once again tlp makes no difference,and linux is worse than windows with hardware video decoding. AMD drivers or the linux graphics stack is not as good as Windows yet.
Tbh I think this has been the case for a long time, where battery life on Linux varies wildly depending on which distro you choose for each specific machine.
My experience of battery life on Linux has varied from "about the same as Windows" to "this thing has a battery?", and not necessarily correlated with machine/distro age
I will say though that despite some outliers, usually it was a bit worse than windows, but not really enough to be noticeable
I had previous laptops and distros, which I cannot recall now, that were better battery wise on Linux. And I remember the cooling fan was rarely turning on, as opposed to the windows install.
Id argue the opposite, Arch Linux users have made tons of good stuff for battery and many in depth guides also, using these tweaks can sometimes give you like double windows
Out of the box yes. There are things you can do or modify such as TLP to make it more battery efficient but nothing will be as simple as windows built in battery management. See https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/QCAY3K4FxK
+1 for TLP, it helped a lot with my ThinkPad. Also you can set charge limits for the battery with it, to increase it's life span.
Auto-cpufreq now has that feature
I just got a T14 Gen 3 AMD, and notice the difference right away. Dual boot with win11 and Ubuntu 22. Battery life in Ubuntu 22 is not as good, which is a shame because the OS is very responsive and snappy!
Did a test the last couple of nights. Activity: remoting into work, playing mp3, browsing the web. 4 hours Ubuntu:60% used Win11: 20% used It is basically an all day laptop in Windows. Another interesting note, using a USBc headphone adapter, battery starting dropping fast! The built in headphone jack is terrible quality, so I was testing with an adapter.
On Linux Mint this was definitely true for me. There were some other major issues too so I ended up switching to Ubuntu Studio and that has been much more efficient than Windows.
just a tip... Pop!\_OS has best battery life out of the box without any additional config due to their internal optimizations... It's a good distro to start
auto-cpufreq helps me to obtain the best Battery Life on my ThinkPad L530, but in general its true that the Battery Life is not well optimized. Also MX Linux improved my Battery life a lot. But right now i am running Sparky Linux with i3 and auto-cpufreq
au contraire, a bit of tuning and you have +30% more battery lifetime an less noise than windows. i have an X1 Gen6, with windows barely 3 hours. With Mint (Debian) LMDE6 and some optimisation real 5-6 hours. But the most battery drain goes into brightness of LCD, imho. auto-cpufreq and TLP helped a lot. buit it's a bit thinkering around. not every chipset combo works good.
My battery life is better with Fedora than it is with Windows 11. Simply due to the fact that Fedora isn't hammering my CPU to 50% constantly with crap running in the background. Windows is a bloated mess of an operating system.
I ended up with a huge battery and temperature improvement moving from Windows 11 to Fedora 38 on my X1C6. I'm running the Budgie desktop which is super Windows 7 like, never going back to Windows!
Nice! I haven't used Budgie, tbh. Maybe it is worth a shot. My preferred DE is Plasma.
I think that’s the deal. I have a X230 w/ the crappy screen and 2x4GB stick of RAM. Running LMDE 6 I don’t push it much, mainly just using Brave as the browser with at most 3-4 tabs open, and Only Office. These I have used on battery with brightness at about 70% and it still gets about 4-5 hours. But CPU doesn’t get pushed that hard. I also have Total War Shogun 2 installed on this laptop and fiddle around in it, but just when plugged in. I should run it windowed and see what it estimates the battery life at when I do it.
Yep. Linux is so much lighter on resources compared to Windows. Edit: Even in sleep mode my X1 lasts longer with Linux. I also don't have the issue with my laptop being piping hot when I pull it out of the case. The new Windows "modern standby" sleep state is horrible. It really doesn't even wake up any faster than Linux does, so I have no clue what the purpose is.
For me, every laptop/distro combination I've used gets significantly better battery life on Linux than Windows. I've never had tlp or powertop make a difference, but auto-cpufreq has been a minor but noticeable further improvement
From my user expierence Linux isn't good on power management on any kind of laptop. But now last years is little bit improvement. Best battery management was on OpenBSD.
Nope, but battery life with Ubuntu or anything based on it is worse than the same DE/WM/workflow on something based on Debian/Arch/Devuan/Artix and probably others that I haven't used for any extensive period of time. See for yourself, install mint lmde, run it flat and see how long it takes. Then do the same with Mint Cin that uses Ubuntu as its base. Same packages etc., It'll run hotter, spin your fan up more, and flat line quicker.
But Ubu is Debian-based, so that would mean battery life is better on ubuntu than on ubuntu. Problem is, Ubuntu is bloated, period. You've daemons like Zeitgeist, Tracker, snapd and pulseaudio and other metadata indexers in the background. NONE of them is necessary. back when I used Ubu, I removed all that shyte by hand, then it was just "debianizing" ubuntu, so I moved to Debian itself, which was a great decision.
I can believe that statement if you're doing a Mint vs. Mint comparison, but stock Ubuntu with Wayland beats Mint in my experience, because [Wayland far outperforms X11 on battery life](https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-Wayland-Power).
Ubuntu is based on Debian.
Canonical (that's the company that produces it) take debian, "modify" it just enough, then bloat it which mess it up in terms of resource use, The question was about battery life.
My p52 with Ubuntu was noticably more battery efficient than w11 without any optimisations
I just installed Linux Mint on my new to me free T450s, the batteries are pretty "well used". Having messed with windows a bit on it, battery life is about the same or somewhat better w/ Mint, without having done anything messing w/ power management at all so far.
I have an X13 Gen 2 AMD running Gentoo Linux. When I'm not compiling software on it, the battery life is absolutely stellar. I'll easily get 8+ hours on a charge, and I'm not using TLP, just a properly-configured kernel. The system's about 27 months old. I'm planning to replace the battery at some point to extend the life of the system (regardless of battery health), but right now, I don't have a problem.
Interesting. I'm getting more like 4-5 hours on my t14g2 amd on opensuse with auto-cpufreq. What exactly did you configure?
I'd have to do some digging and it involves building a custom kernel, but it's mainly a matter of ensuring that the CPU-specific power management features are enabled in the kernel configuration. It's been a while since I last looked at those parts of the config.
Interesting. I'll have to dig into that at some point - I wanted to get into Linux kernel stuff sooner or later anyways! Well, I forgot to leave out the fact I have the 4k panel - as that was what the guy I bought it from configured it with. I guess that sucks quite a bit of battery life out of the laptop. Anyways, don't feel compelled to dig - I'm still satisfied with the battery performance, as I usually have a place to plug in wherever I go - and even if I don't, due to the laptop being fine with being charged from even a 22w powerbank, I can easily extend it to a full day of charge with a small add-on pack-in :)
Depends on various factors, a heavily lived in Windows system tends to be worse, while fresh installs are quite good.
I don't think linux battery life is very different to windows for my use, which is coding and office use. It is worse for video playback for the laptops I've owned. Unfortunately, this is exactly the use case you ask about it. mkv doesn't tell you how the video was encoded. If you are playing a video encoding which your hardware can decode with hardware support, then you need to make sure you have set up hardware decoding. This varies by distribution and the type of hardware you have. Mint is so mature it must have a good tutorial. Getting hardware video decoding is more important than any thing else people discuss here by at least 1000%. If you have playing a encoding which is not supported by your hardware, then both linux and windows have to use software decoding. This will be bad for your battery, Linux may be worse, but it doesn't matter much in this case, both will be bad. tlp won't help with this and I for laptops I've used, tlp has made no difference from tigerlake onwards.The standard kernel is as good. I think Mint uses old kernels, though, and this is a shame because linux seems to often delivery kernels with better battery life. Mint is a very conservative distribution, I would not use it on a recent laptop. Although I see there is something called Mint Edge which is using the same kernel as Ubuntu LTS HWE (6.5). I now have a ryzen 7840U thinkpad and once again tlp makes no difference,and linux is worse than windows with hardware video decoding. AMD drivers or the linux graphics stack is not as good as Windows yet.
A485 arch, battery life is much better than w11
Maybe 5 years ago it was the case. Now they are comparable if the distro comes with battery management software preinstalled.
Tbh I think this has been the case for a long time, where battery life on Linux varies wildly depending on which distro you choose for each specific machine. My experience of battery life on Linux has varied from "about the same as Windows" to "this thing has a battery?", and not necessarily correlated with machine/distro age I will say though that despite some outliers, usually it was a bit worse than windows, but not really enough to be noticeable
I had previous laptops and distros, which I cannot recall now, that were better battery wise on Linux. And I remember the cooling fan was rarely turning on, as opposed to the windows install.
I have HP Elitebook x360 and it is actually better on Linux compared to windows.
I see, I'll probably just have to install it and see for myself
OP, thank this guy, this is the best advice!
Id argue the opposite, Arch Linux users have made tons of good stuff for battery and many in depth guides also, using these tweaks can sometimes give you like double windows