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0 pointsacehack10y ago0 comments

Well I'm one Arch + Gentoo user. Though I've optimized both to be as energy efficient as possible, I've never been able to get something comparable to Windows in terms of battery life. So once it's fully optimized (and I'm on XMonad, not GNOME, so power consumption should be fairly less), I can draw about 3 hours or so, as long as my browser (Chrome) isn't running Javascript. The moment I start some decent browsing, I cannot get more than say 2 hours from my laptop. Video watching? Again, not more than 2 hours. On Windows I could go on to watch movies for more than 4 hours (this might be less because of the smaller battery on my device). Do you do some special magic to get that much juice out of your battery? I'd love to know some cool tips. I myself wrote some on my blog.

P.S. Not to mention, running Emerge on Gentoo with -j9 lands me at a battery life of less than half an hour :P

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oxplot10y ago

As boring as it may sound, I didn't do anything special, just the run of the mill practices: lowering brightness, running `powertop` and setting all tunables to "Good". At idle, this gives me ~3 Watts usage. With the 46 Wh battery, that's 15 hours. Of course when I start using the laptop that's halved more or less. With the screen off (when I'm using the external screen), it goes down to ~2 Watts, for a whopping 23 hours battery life at idle. I remember an Acer Travelmate I purchased back in 2009. The lowest I could get the power consumption was 7 Watts at idle. I'd say Intel for the most part, has come a long way in power efficiency.

EDIT: I use Mate Desktop BTW.

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