A Closer Look At The Linux Laptop Power Use Between Ubuntu, Fedora, Clear & Antergos

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Closer Look At The Linux Laptop Power Use Between Ubuntu, Fedora, Clear & Antergos

Earlier this month I posted some results when looking at the Windows 10 versus Linux power consumption using a Kabylake-R Dell XPS 13 laptop and testing Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. For some additional numbers, I took three other distinctly different laptops and tested them on a few Linux distributions to see how their battery life and power efficiency compare as additional metrics to complement this earlier data.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26606

[tildearrow]

Typos:

With this Linux laptop battery life testing on Arch / Clear / Fedora/ Ubuntu were

(missing space in Fedora)

opening the default web browser and naviating to Phoronix.com,

use wasmuch lower at 10.9 Watts and Fedora/Cleat at 13 Watts.

[Aleksei]

Interesting. It would be even more interesting to have some minimalist install in the mix (say Arch with just i3) to see how much power bloated DEs (Gnome etc) eat up in graphics-intensive workloads.

[dispat0r]

Canonical should look at the Clear Linux patches for the kernel, gcc and glibc. Clearly they could improve the performance quiet a bit.

[mistvieh]

Interesting. It would be even more interesting to have some minimalist install in the mix (say Arch with just i3) to see how much power bloated DEs (Gnome etc) eat up in graphics-intensive workloads.

I own a X1 Carbon 5th. Idle consumption is approx. 1W less with i3 than with KDE/Gnome. THAT is impressive. Overall power consumption is much better with such a minimalistic WM. (2.3W vs. 3.2W)

By the way, I'd appreciate numbers for the energy consumed, not some strange plots about power usage. The latter are pretty useless.

[r1348]

Any chance we'll ever see these tests on non-Intel laptops?

[Michael]

Any chance we'll ever see these tests on non-Intel laptops?

Unlikely anything in the near-medium term as I don't have any AMD laptop currently and no indication that is going to change anytime soon.

[creative]

It is no surprise about the Lenovo, looks like a sweet little portable production station. If I had the money and was in the market for a laptop I would go Lenovo for sure.

[alex79]

I have Thinkpad T450s and tried Ubuntu Mate 18.04 and while I don't have numbers it seemed ok, the only test I did was to stream Youtube 1080p video on WiFi and it lasted just over 2 hours on 3 cell battery. Than I installed Fedora 28 and tried it with tlp and powertop installed and did similar test that lasted over 3 hours. What annoys me with Fedora is that it drains a lot more power when the lid is closed ( suspend ). I will need to try more tests but it's been so hot over the last couple of week that it drains all my power

ps: Fedora with Mate desktop

[wizard69]

Interesting numbers, while i never timed it against windows my AMD Ryzen based HP ENVY appears to perform as well under Fedora 28 as it did under Windows 10 for battery life possibly even better. That isnt surprising as Windows 10 appears to have some significant bugs.

The one qualifier here is that it doesnt always suspend correctly. Interesting is that does not appear to be an AMD problem from what i gather reading this thread. Beyond this one qualifier though Fedora feels much faster than Windows at least in the desktop.

I really like the way Ryzen powers this laptop, even if Linux support was slow in coming! It is nice to know that we have a viable x86 alternative to Intel to push competition.