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A comment on Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu.

Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu by mattlondon on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:51PM (#37905441)
Classic Linux driver issues. None of the power saving or advanced hardware features get used most of the time. I've had the same with Dell and Lenovo Linux machines - CPU never throttles down and is at full-chat 100% of the time. You'll probably also find out that one or more of the following will also not work properly: Bluetooth, sleep, wake from sleep, fingerprint readers, audio.

I'd recommend installing windows 11 if battery life is important (not trolling - windows just works with this sort of thing, Linux never does in my experience). Use WSL or docker to run Linux if you need it for development

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Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu by lucb1e on Monday October 16, 2023 @04:01PM (#37905633)
What power saving features would one use while actively in a video call? I doubt this is OP's problem
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Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu by seabrookmx on Monday October 16, 2023 @04:13PM (#37905836)
The ones that interact with the GPU / hardware video decode blocks.

That's assuming their device is even using hardware accelerated video (many distros don't by default) but even with it enabled on my Framework 13 I still see the same behavior as OP. About 90minutes in Google meet, 4hrs in VSCode and more vanilla browsing. 6hrs easily in Windows.

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Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu by CharlesW on Monday October 16, 2023 @04:04PM (#37905686)
One example would be hardware video encode/decode.
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Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu by jwells89 on Monday October 16, 2023 @04:05PM (#37905710)
> You'll probably also find out that one or more of the following will also not work properly: Bluetooth, sleep, wake from sleep, fingerprint readers, audio.

YMMV but in my experience this comes down to the quality of components used in the laptop. I've never had trouble out of Intel networking (ethernet, wifi, and bluetooth) under Linux for example, but anything else is hit or miss. It's not a perfect rule but the nicer laptops (Thinkpad X1 series for example) tend to be the ones that get components with good Linux compatibility… midrange and below by contrast is a minefield.

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Re:Ask HN: New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu by ASalazarMX on Tuesday October 17, 2023 @02:53PM (#37919829)
Ubuntu has a certified laptop list, practically everything just works with the defaults. Never got the fingerprint reader to work on my laptop, though.

https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops

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