this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Battery life on Ubuntu with AMD (alien.top)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Out of curiosity, I've seen decent things about the battery life improvement with the new AMD boards in Windows. What's the battery life like in linux, particularly Ubuntu? Experiences with other distros also welcome.

Thinking of giving Linux an actual shot this time around as a daily driver.

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I’ve tested both Fedora and Ubuntu against Windows 11. For me at least, I was excited to switch to Linux full time or 90% of the time at least, but don’t think I can quite yet. I think we need some community tweaks / guides and potentially some more optimization AMD needs to put into the drivers.

For office / web productivity use I’d expect like 6-7 hours of battery on Linux. For video playback 4-5 hours. Not only is hardware video decoding broken in many scenarios, but it also consumes 50-100% more power than it does on Windows. Tested just using offline mp4 video files using MPV on Linux and the stock video app on windows.

Currently in Windows 11 under the power saver mode I can easily get 8-10 hours of office / web and 8-9 hours of video playback / YouTube. That’s much more acceptable to me at least for now.

The actual experience of using Linux is great, but it being a laptop, optimizing power usage is also very important. I am somewhat OK with less battery life, but the other thing to consider is heat generation. I like to use my laptop on the couch which means it’s on my lap. Under windows it’s fanless and cool while browsing, not so much on Linux right now.