> In other words: get an actually Linux supported laptop for Linux.

40% battery for 4hrs of real work is better than pretty much any linux supported laptop I've ever used

One of my favorite machines was the MacBook Air 11 (2012). This was a pure Intel machine, except for a mediocre Broadcom wireless card. With a few udev rules, I squeezed out the same battery performance from Linux I got from OS X, down to a few minutes of advantage in favor of Linux. And all this despite Safari being a marvel of energy efficiency.

The problem with Linux performance on laptops boils down to i) no energy tweaks by default and ii) poor device drivers due to the lack of manufacturer cooperation. If you pick a machine with well supported hardware and you are diligent with some udev rules, which are quite trivial to write thanks to powertop suggestions, performance can be very good.

I am getting a bit more than 10 hours from a cheap ThinkPad E14 Gen7, with a 64 Wh battery, and light coding use. That's less than a MacBook Air, where I would be getting around 13-14 hours, but it's not bad at all. The difference comes mainly from the cheap screen that is more power consuming and ARMs superior efficiency when idling.

But I prefer not to trade the convenience and openness of x86_64 plus NixOS for a bit more battery range. IMHO, the gap is not sufficiently wide to make a big difference in most usage scenarios.

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cosmic_cheese 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The need to tweak that deeply just to get “baseline” performance really stings, though, particularly if you’re not already accustomed to having to do that kind of thing.

It’d be a gargantuan project, but there should probably be some kind of centralized, cross-distro repository for power configuration profiles that allows users to rate them with their hardware. Once a profile has been sufficiently user-verified and is well rated, distro installers could then automatically fetch and install the profile as a post-install step, making for a much more seamless and less fiddly experience for users.

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ffsm8 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not trying to discredit your idea, but I feel like you're misrepresenting the amount of optimization apple does by calling it baseline.

It's generally the most optimized system down to the fact that Apple controls everything about it's platform.

If that's considered baseline, then nothing but full vertical integration can compete

	▲	cosmic_cheese 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For some laptops, this applies in comparison to Windows, too though (see elsewhere in thread for examples).

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nextos 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The advantage of Apple is that they deal with a tiny amount of hardware. Vertical integration enables aggressive optimizations.

I agree that in case of Linux, a udev rule generator would be a fantastic step ahead in terms of usability.

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overfeed 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 40% battery for 4hrs of real work is better than pretty much any linux supported laptop I've ever used

Not sure what "real work" is for you, but I regularly get more than 12 hours of battery life on an old Chromebook running a Linux and the usual IDEs/dev tooling (in a Crostini VM). All the drivers just work, sleep has no detectable battery drain. It's not a workstation by any means, but dual core Intel's are great for Python/Go/TypeScript

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trinix912 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Out of curiosity, does Google contribute the drivers for Chromebook hardware to Linux upstream or do they keep it for themselves? Could it be that they just choose the hardware that works very well out of box with Linux?

	▲	overfeed 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have no idea if there's upstreaming, but the Chomium OS repo is open source so you could check. I don't know if that would help the wider Linux laptop community, because Chromebook OEMs can only select from a small list of CPU & chipset hardware combinations blessed by Google

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ryukoposting 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's the bar here? My Thinkpad X270 gets about 16 hours under Ubuntu with swaywm.

If we really want to get pedantic, its internal battery means the external pack is hot-swappable, so I can actually get several days on a "single charge." Good machine for camping trips.

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izacus 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	dang 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Please don't cross into personal attack, name-calling, or cross-examination. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I see how the GP comment could be provocative, but on this site we want responses that dampen provocation, not amplify it.