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Suggestions for laptops with good driver support and long battery life

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  • Suggestions for laptops with good driver support and long battery life

    Hello,

    My Dell XPS 13 from 2013 is now getting quite long in the tooth - the bad battery support from Linux over the years, and all the charge/drain cycles it induced, have destroyed the battery's health. In addition, I find myself running out of RAM quite a lot now (thanks, DevOps career and all the VMs I have to run!)

    So I'm on the lookout for a new laptop. Preferably one with 16GB of RAM, a much bigger display (at least 15.6"), and excellent Linux power saving support (i.e. I want to be able to get 5-6 hours of development work in on battery).

    And it's got to have a standard-ish PC keyboard (i.e. no Macs).

    Can anyone give me suggestions?

    Thanks

  • #2
    Sorry, no specific suggestions.

    If money wasn't a matter for me I'd go for a Thinkpad though.

    I would take a good look at Powertop's informations though.
    After over a year of using my notebook I discovered that my ethernet plug was always consuming 80% of its maximum power, which was about 2 watts, despite me always using wifi and not ethernet and I always had Wake-On-Lan off.

    A similiar thing applied to my SD Card Reader, which I similiarly never use, but on a much lesser scale.
    By turning the devices off the rough way (echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb/xxxx/remove) I could increase my battery life by 30% up to Windows 10 standards. Went from 9.8 watts to 7.3 watts.
    Those devices misbehaved despite running TLP, which is supposed to have somewhat granular control over them.
    I once tried WattOS, which used laptop-mode-tools instead of TLP but the side-effects were pretty bad. USB-Mouse never woke USB up when I recovered my system from stand-by, thus giving me very dodgy cursor control.

    I am sure a similar thing could be observed on other notebooks. I wouldn't worry about proper hardware support too much but take things into my own hands by fine-tuning the system manually. The only really important things are a big battery and efficient CPU and display. Those ones you cannot really fine-tune, so they need to be efficient OOTB.

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