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

First up was a look at the idle power consumption as well as the load when engaging in some light desktop tasks of opening the default web browser and navigating to Phoronix.com, launching the file manager, and then just basic interactions with the desktop environment for a period of five minutes.

With the Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop featuring the Broadwell CPU, the tested Linux distribution with the lowest battery power use recorded was Fedora Workstation 28 -- similar to our findings with the Dell XPS 13 Kabylake-R system in the results shared earlier this month. The average power use was the best with Antergos 18.7 at 6.5 Watts and Fedora 28 at 6.8 Watts while Clear Linux came in at 7.3 Watts while Ubuntu 18.04 LTS had the highest average power use at 8.3 Watts. Not only was the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS average power use the highest, but the peak power use was also the greatest at 14.2 Watts while Antergos 18.7's peak power use was much lower at 10.9 Watts and Fedora/Clear at 13 Watts. Antergos having the lowest peak power use was also observed on the ASUS UX32VDA laptop and was also very good on the UX301LAA but edged out slightly by the other two working distros. On the UX32VDA laptop, Fedora 28 was observed with the lowest minimum power draw too. Fedora's power optimization work appears to be paying off while the Antergos power draw was also surprisingly good. Clear Linux with its decisions to use the P-State performance governor and other performance-optimized changes by default still led to a good balance in the power consumption while Ubuntu 18.04 tended to be the most power hungry in this basic desktop testing.

When running an SQLite benchmark given the wide adoption of this embedded database library especially among desktop applications, when it came to raw performance Intel's Clear Linux had the lead -- with the exception of the UX32VDA not running Clear due to the aforementioned UEFI boot problem. There was also the issue of Ubuntu 18.04's installer on the UX301LAA laptop as also previously documented.

Clear's faster SQLite performance did lead to slightly higher power use: on the X1 Carbon this was a difference of ~8.9 Watts for Antergos and Fedora compared to 9.6 Watts for Clear Linux while Ubuntu 18.04 still tended to be on the power hungry side coming in with an average of 9.4 Watts. The UX301LAA laptop saw Clear Linux with an average of 14.5 Watts compared to ~13.4 Watts for Antergos/Fedora. On the UX32VDA system, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS continued to have the highest power use of the tested Linux distributions.

When carrying out some FLAC audio encoding, this single-threaded benchmark had a slight lead on Clear Linux for the raw performance while its power use was quite efficient as well. On the UX301LAA laptop, Clear's average power use was in line with Antergos and Fedora. The average power use on the X1 Carbon laptop for Clear Linux even came out lower than Fedora and Antergos. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS continued to have the highest power draw of the hardware and operating systems tested.