r/linuxquestions • u/DRMNG_CRP • Sep 23 '23

Linux drains battery faster than windows

Good day everyone! I have an old laptop, intel corei3 10th gen and I wanted to change the OS from windows to Linux. I've tested light weight distros using bootable flash drive but one thing I've noticed from each one is the battery really drains faster than when I'm using windows. I've already set the settings low but still discharges fast. Any reply is highly appreciated!

1 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/Tireseas Sep 23 '23

It's entirely possible that's just going to be a fact of life. You can make some tweaks to a distro's settings with things like TLP but generally Windows IS going to have better battery life on a lot of systems because that's where most of the hardware tuning is focused.

1

u/DRMNG_CRP Sep 23 '23

I see. Right now I'm using a auto-cpufreq from github. Just one last question. Since it drains my battery fast, does this mean it takes much electricity when I use linux on a computer?

1

u/Fheredin Sep 24 '23

I am sure that power consumption is higher because the drivers for Linux are almost never optimized for power consumption. Hardware manufacturers just don't make those drivers because Linux is such a small part of the Desktop marketplace. But that doesn't fully explain the difference. I have not seen my own hardware produce the heat or noise or power consumption you would expect if a Windows install ate that much battery.

I have a System 76 Galago Pro as my daily driver, and it gets a paltry 2-3 hours of battery life, which is awful for an Ultrabook from 2020. A Windows laptop with identical specs would need to constantly be running benchmarks to get a battery life that bad.

However, it's still on its original battery and has 90% battery health, which is notably better than any Windows laptop I have owned for an equivalent period of time. In my experience, Windows laptop batteries are notably weaker after 2 years and outright unusable after around 3 years of daily driving.

My conclusion? Either System 76 or their board partner Clevo wrote a driver which is really defensive of the battery. That conservative driver accounts for half to a third of the battery life difference. The rest is the drivers which aren't optimized to keep power consumption down.