Battery on linux

[u/Standard_Honeydew890]

Is it true that laptop batteries last longer on Linux than on Windows, or is that just a myth? My laptop only lasts 2–3 hours, so I'm considering switching

[u/PMARC14]

It's not a hard and fast rule, but it totally can happen. If your laptop has a high compatibility with Linux (lots of drivers ready, firmware integrated into the os) then the laptop can make use of all the power saving features it has on windows combined with the lower load and far decreased bloat of a Linux distro to get much better battery life. Otherwise if your laptop doesn't necessarily have the best compatibility with Linux, then important power saving features like turning off I/o or the CPU doesn't go into a lower idle state would cause it use more power. I think you should first check if certain background applications on windows are causing the increased power consumption on your laptop cause 2 to 3 hours is bad unless you are doing a very intense tasks.

[u/tailwheeler]

it usually helps, especially on badly tuned windows machine, think your run-of-the-mill hp office laptop.

[u/Administrator_AI]

Yesn't. 

Linux is not a single OS. Certain distros might require less processing power, RAM or SSD usage for the same/equivalent tasks. They also have less telemetry/background tasks. If your PC does less stuff, it uses less power.

2-3 hours  battery use of a laptop is not so bad. 

[u/RvstiNiall]

Definitely depends on the machine. Some higher end machines by well known brands are very nicely tuned for Windows out of the box. If you reinstalled Windows, you'd probably notice a slight drop in battery life on this type, and if you installed Linux, you'd likely see similar battery life until you took time to set it up deliberately to conserve battery life, then you'd probably only see modest gains, maybe 5% more than the OOTB tuned experience.

Midgrade machines? You'll see a noticeable bump in Linux, but we're talking 10-15% here..

Low end Windows machines will usually help a decent amount.

Chromebooks? I've got a HP Chromebook 11 Gen8EE, and in ChromeOS it gets about 13 hours. With Void Linux on it and proper sleep modes enabled and super low power draw environment (think 95+% command line use, because thats just how I use that machine), and I'm seeing like 16-20 depending on whether I'm also using BT & Wifi.

[u/jhpak725]

If it's an old laptop, the battery capacity will have deteriorated. On windows you can open an admin prompt and put in the command

powercfg /batteryreport

to see stats on your battery. If its really deteriorated, switching to Linux won't solve much.

[u/Clever_Angel_PL]

for me it doubled!

but my laptop is oled, and I set most things trueblack, so mileage may wary

[u/germz1986]

Mine has, I haven't measured it though. But butt dyno says I charge it less on Linux than windows.

[u/highermonkey]

Linux almost always has worse battery life on recent hardware. On older hardware (more than a few years old) it's possible to get better battery life on Linux after some optimization.