Red Hat Planning Fresh Work On Linux Battery Life, Testers Needed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Planning Fresh Work On Linux Battery Life, Testers Needed

Hans de Goede's latest assignment at Red Hat is working to improve Linux laptop battery life...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Hans-Extending-Linux-Battery

[timofonic]

I offer as tester. Battery life of my laptop sucks. I also "love" how WiFi becomes unusable after back from suspend or hibernate and need to reboot to make it working again.

[Wilfred]

Yes, I'm going to test too. Just need to create those backups first. Thanks for the heads up Michael.

[Brisse]

Suggestion: Work towards enabling hardware accelerated video playback out of the box. It does a lot for battery life when watching videos. I know Ubuntu 17.10 is working on this.

[schmidtbag]

I offer as tester. Battery life of my laptop sucks. I also "love" how WiFi becomes unusable after back from suspend or hibernate and need to reboot to make it working again.

Does your laptop battery suck specifically in Linux? Because if it's not really any better in Windows, Goede can't improve it further.

I'd suggest you adjust your wifi chipset's modprobe settings. In my experience, some can cause signal dropouts, while others are specifically related to power (and are poorly implemented). At the very least, you could try enabling and disabling airplane mode when coming back from suspend/hibernate. Wifi for me doesn't have any issues with standby, so this isn't a universal issue.

[schmidtbag]

Note: for whatever reason my first post was unapproved.

I offer as tester. Battery life of my laptop sucks. I also "love" how WiFi becomes unusable after back from suspend or hibernate and need to reboot to make it working again.

Is your battery life any better in Windows? Because if not [much], whatever changes RH does are not going to help improve your situation.
As for wifi, have you tried toggling airplane mode on and off? Have you looked into any modprobe flags for your wifi chipset? Sometimes these things can make a real big difference in stability. My wifi chipset doesn't have any issues with standby, so this isn't a universal issue.

[Vistaus]

My battery lasts 10-11 hours with normal usage under Solus and 9-10 hours with heavy usage, that's more than enough juice for me. So I'm not gonna test this.

[polarathene]

My battery lasts 10-11 hours with normal usage under Solus and 9-10 hours with heavy usage, that's more than enough juice for me. So I'm not gonna test this.

What is the laptop? I think my 2014 MSI one manages 4 hours at best but usually more like 2..

[Candy]

I removed Gnome3 in favour to Xfce and noticed a huge improvement in battery life for my notebook.

At the end! It also depends on the stuff you're running.

[andrebrait]

My battery lasts 10-11 hours with normal usage under Solus and 9-10 hours with heavy usage, that's more than enough juice for me. So I'm not gonna test this.

IIRC Solus ships with TLP out of the box, so it's expected that it's going to last longer than most Linux distros that don't ship with TLP.

Also, which desktop are you running? In my experience, the best to worst battery life I get is usually something like XFCE>KDE>Unity>>>GNOME.