Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu
by ramesh31 on Monday October 16, 2023 @02:43PM
(#37904238)
So long as power management is not a central core component managed by the kernel, this will continue to be a problem on Linux. Apple hardware is untouchable for battery life precisely for this reason; they don't use bigger batteries or have a significantly lower TDP than anything else. It's just tons and tons of clever little hacks implemented at every layer of the OS that sum up to a seamless experience while maintaining optimal power usage.
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Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu
by 1970-01-01 on Monday October 16, 2023 @02:51PM
(#37904348)
It's been this way forever, don't expect a fix. Battery management, sleep, suspend, monitor wake, and even CPU throttle is fundamentally broken compared to Windows or Mac. Hours of time can be invested to make it work, but then it will just break again randomly.
Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu
by megous on Monday October 16, 2023 @02:58PM
(#37904488)
power management is a central core component managed by the kernel
Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu
by theodric on Monday October 16, 2023 @02:55PM
(#37904434)
Look, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I get 4 hours of web browsing out of my M1 air with 83% battery health so it must go deeper, like Firefox is deoptimized or something. It's about on par with my ThinkPad E14, and worse than my 2017 i7 MacBook Air, disappointingly.
Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu
by jwells89 on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:09PM
(#37904682)
Generally both Chrome and Firefox are significantly worse for battery life under macOS than Safari is.
I think the main thing is that standalone browser vendors aren’t incentivized to care all that much about being efficient; for them acing speed benchmarks and gee-whiz bells and whistles seems to be what sells better. By contrast OS vendors want battery life figures to look great because that sells laptops. This is why pre-Chromium MS Edge bested Chrome and Firefox for battery life on Windows and why Safari does the same on macOS today.
Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu
by nntwozz on Monday October 16, 2023 @04:03PM
(#37905677)
The Apple M1 etc. chips are actually one of the main reasons why they now have such a huge lead in battery life. It's not all deeply integrated software, back in the Intel days macOS still had great battery life but the new chips took it to the next level.