All Linux Things

So, I'd never really tried to use it very much on battery, but was using it yesterday. Was at like 78% when I unplugged it (thresholds to prevent undo battery life drop), and within an HOUR, it was at 5%. Wasn't sure if I had a bum battery or if it was just OpenSUSE, so installed Windows 10. It's been 1.5 hours since 100% battery, and it's still @89%. So going to test if Debian is any better on this hardware. Meanwhile, I'm going to put the OpenSUSE install on the T14 G1 to see if it lkes that any better. I seem to recall that it seems pretty happy on hte T14 G2, so it should like that hardware.

Interesting as Ive had issues with OpenSUSE in the past and laptop batteries. With my laptops Debian has no issues with the battery and Windows 10 has always been good.

Seems for me it's only the K14. Installed on my T14, 89% battery. Unplugged, and it's been 30 minutes, 84%.

It wasnt all my laptops but some of them had issues mostly Dell. This was awhile ago but I see blurbs in forums all the time about OpenSUSE issues with batteries. PCLinuxOS use to have an issue at one time but was solved.

Have you installed tlp? I think it was originally for Thinkpads, but is now more universal I believe. On my old ThinkPad it makes a big difference in battery life.

I don't bother with TLP. I'm not willing to take the time to configure it through the text files. That's one of the applications that absolutely REQUIRES a gui, IMO. There's simply too many options for a text file to be understandable.

Does seem to be an issue just with that hardware and OpenSUSE. I've got Debian now on the K14, and it's been on battery far past 30 minutes, approaching an hour, and I've lost like 10% battery life, possibly even a tiny less than 10%. At any rate, seems Debian is just fine with this hardware. Maybe not as efficient as it is with Windows, but quite good (it's esitmating about 6 hours left, so 7 hours total, which is 1 hour less than Windows was estimating)

So far I find batteries dont last as long in Linux as they do in Windows.

Some of the hardware in the past I actually got better battery life on than in Windows, but in general, unless you do something like tlp and tune it, you won't get quite as good. However, they are trying to change that, as many distro's are moving over to the newer versions of the schedulers that are supposed to be much better. And AMD w/ Zen3 and up you can switch from acpi-pstate controller to amd-pstate controller, which allows for MUCH lower clocks on the low side (I haven't seen any pre-zen3 LAPTOPS that work with it, although oddly some desktops do).

In my case it isnt bad in most cases, usually at most a difference of 1-1.5 hours of battery life with Linux versus Windows.