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0 pointsKingMachiavelli6y ago0 comments

Their are a variety of ways to manage all of the power management settings on Linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management

It can be a pain; enabeling sleep for every USB devices will likely result in the keyboard or touchpad becoming broken, increase the latency it takes to respond, etc. But once it's configured it just works very well. I'm getting 10+ hours on a Dell XPS 13" under light web browsing + youtube.

Any Apple laptop will likely need some unique customizations for everything to work and for maximum battery life. It could be argued that instead its popularity drives up the number of discovered errata. Case in point, the Archlinux page contains not only an extensive "Mac" page but it also has dozens of pages for specific Apple computers documenting pretty much everything you would need to know to get every feature working and get comparable battery life (could be a little better or worse).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro#Power_manage...

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neilv6y ago

In case anyone reading doesn't know, the Arch Linux distro's wiki is great, and you don't need to use Arch to benefit from the wiki.

(The Arch wiki might be my single most useful source of technical info when tweaking things on Debian lately. I haven't tweaked laptop power management lately, but I used to do it aggressively, including building my own kernel, making sure CPU power management was working, tracking down every process that used CPU cycles or spun up the disk for no reason, turning off devices I didn't need, dimming CCFL backlight, etc.)

jammygit6y ago

As a counterpoint, my XP’s 13 gets fairly mediocre battery life (4-6 hours?) because I never figured out how to configure the power settings. It also doesn’t fully wake up sometimes, but that’s pretty rare now - Ubuntu 19 seems to have fixed that. It’s my desktop that fails to wake sometimes now, even with suspend turned off (also Ubuntu 19. The memory leaks/performance slowdowns are improved too, but not gone - is, the laptop slow down after being on for a couple of hours. I think it’s from failing to fully wake from suspend or hibernate?

That said, it’s a great OS. I just wish it was less buggy. Not planning to switch in the near future

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