As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world.

Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't be left in standby for too long or it drains to zero.

Meanwhile, it's been 10+ years since I've worried about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices, even my 3-5 year old ones. I can fall asleep with Youtube playing and it's still playing when I wake up. I'm certainly not here to dunk on Linux phones. I want one! But if someone willing to put forth above average effort to use these devices can't realistically daily drive them, who can?

N hours of actual use, in isolation, is just the matter of calculating average power draw[W] by runtime[hr] and buying the battery with Wh figures comfortably bigger than that.

e.g. your device consumed 1 Watt on average, you wanted 8 hour runtime, then you need a battery with 8 Watt-hours, or 2,162.162162162162 mAh at 3.7V of capacity, before factoring in buffers of various kinds. But it's also roughly the datasheet nominal capacity of a single 18650 cell.

You don't worry about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices and you can fall asleep with YouTube playing and it's still playing when you wake up because manufacturers know consumers do that and optimize the phone to make that work. They probably reduce display brightness, cut powers to mics and P cores, ask 3M to make the pouch films 1% thinner so battery could be few more percent bigger inside, fudge battery gauges so you would be nudged correctly to have enough charge before you fall asleep, the list goes as far as your imagination could possibly go.

The fact that same behaviors don't happen on Linux devices, even with something like four of fresh 18650s, means the list ends before it begins. They probably don't do ANY power profiling AT ALL. I'm sure they don't do ANY environmental testing, either.

Would I accept that as a consumer? No. Would I if I was the manufacturer? ...

>Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use?

What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.

This is a big part of why Android was developed in the first place. The operating system and application architecture that makes sense on desktop just doesn't make sense on mobile. Despite the many problems Google's restrictive APIs which you are forced to use can cause for developers, they are also highly optimized for power usage.

yeah there are lots of tablets and 2-1 with amd chips that can do 8 hours on light usage.

Did you know that you can replace the battery in Librem 5 and Pinephone on the go?

With my, atypical maybe?, use, I get up to 2 days on a 4KmA battery (Gigaset GS5, SailfishOs). Sometimes I'm down to 1 day if I do social media scrolling.

My HP laptop lasts 2 hours running linux. My macbook air m4 lasts 12 hours.