Battery life benchmarks

[Yanpas]

It would be quite interesting to see comparison of battery life Windows 10 vs some Linux distro with similar settings. According to this article (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html) modern notebooks with Skylake and Kabylake live much longer on Windows.
There are no such tests in the Internet, so I hope Phoronix will do them

[linuxgeex]

Yeah this is an interesting one. With my assorted laptop hardware I have always been able to outperform Windows' battery life with a hand-tweaked Linux installation, but a stock install of Debian or Ubuntu has usually consumed anywhere from 40-200% more power at idle than Windows before I started tweaking.

Usually the minimum steps to perform on a fresh Ubuntu installation on a laptop are to install laptop-mode-tools, powertop, and powerstat, see powertop's recommendations, then update laptop-mode's config files accordingly, increase the disk writeback delay, and lastly verify everything with powerstat. And if you are brave, try enabling wifi power management... that usually results in regular retrains which can actually increase your power usage. You can also increase your router's beacon interval, but that won't help you on the road.

Other things I have done to maximise battery life:

Run XFCE4 with compositing enabled and all effects off. This saves a lot of repaints which saves a surprising amount of power when moving the pointer around. If you have a touch device it probably won't help as much.

Disable unneeded devices in your BIOS. I have my media reader, ethernet adapter, and DVD drive all disabled.

In your browser, if you browse a lot and don't mind a bit of jitter:

firefox about:config layout.frame_rate 12

and this userscript reduces at least jQuery animations to the same low frame rate:

// ==UserScript==
// @name 12fps jQuery
// @namespace *
// @description jQuery animations 12fps
// @version 1
// grant none
// ==/UserScript==

if ($ && $.fx && $.fx.interval) {
$.fx.interval=1000/12;
}