99Wh Battery Linux Laptop(tuxedocomputers.com) |
99Wh Battery Linux Laptop(tuxedocomputers.com) |
Ordered today actually. I've been torn between getting a 14" vs 16", since I am also replacing an old xps 15. But the extended battery life of the 14" is what finally convinced me.
The Starlab Starfighter also looks great, but I need a replacement laptop this year preferably.
Glue-on anti-glare films exist, but they are finicky to apply.
That’s what’s setting the glass ceiling here to 99Wh.
I'm running a very recent kernel in Fedora and have tried numerous power saving mechanisms (currently autocpufreq, although it's results are not much different from gnome PPD) and I'm lucky if I get 3 hours from the thing while running 10-15 FF tabs and a single instance of VSCode+Remote SSH extension. This is ~1/2 of what I can get in Windows.
I think a lot of Linux users would be surpised how good their battery life would be if they installed Windows on their laptops. It's not Linux's fault per se, it's just that there's considerably less engineering manpower going into tuning the power efficiency of laptop hardware on Linux. People get up in arms because they can't reconcile the fact that "Windows is bloated" with the fact that it gets better battery life, but if you think about it for a few seconds it really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Or any other "performance"-component for that matter, which typically requires proprietary software counterpart (drivers) to run efficiently. Most vendors only ship decent Windows drivers, and the Linux counterpart (if any) is considered "good enough".
I would not consider this the fault of kernel developers. Often there is basically nothing they can do. You just need to look at what hoops the Nouveau-devs have to jump through - colossal effort, little appreciation from users.
It all comes down to driver support. If you manufacturer doesn't have proper drivers, your experience will suck. It says a lot about Lenovo that open source Linux drivers work better than their proprietary ones, but that probably comes with the territory if you combine Intel and Nvidia.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220901221720.1105021-1-joel@jo...
One thing I noticed almost immediately when running linux is that when I was just farting around learning the OS, the laptop would get stone cold. But when I did something large, like compile a kernel, while the laptop was actually on my lap I could physically feel the heat from the CPU start to leak through the case.
I find it much more damming that Apple smokes Windows in battery life even despite Microsoft having its own line of laptops (Surface) and having the money to pour into it vs Linux.
If you're on Gnome use "power saving" performance mode. Proprietary OSes throttle aggressively whereas Linux doesn't on "balanced" mode.
Linux is great
Not sure why this is getting downvoted
So now my battery is just a UPS. Which is actually kind of nice at times!
Now if only everything else worked flawlessly out of the box.
I like this in general, but $2400 + $100 shipping for an i7-12700H / 32GB DDR5 / 2TB 980 Pro / non-OLED display is a bit high. I'm personally waiting for this Vivobook Pro 16x to drop later this year: https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-creators/vivobook/vivobook-...
- Ryzen 9 6900HX (8-core / 4.9Ghz) - RTX 3060 / 6GB GDDR6 - Choice between 4K/60 OLED or 3200x2000/120 OLED, both with >=550nits and TUV cert - 2x NVMe slots so 8TB max SSD? - 90whr battery - The current model is $1650 / free shipping on Amazon so expected pricing is the same as it replaces that model (current: M7600RE-XB99, new: M7601)
For $2400 you can get a ProArt Studiobook H5600QR-XB99 with Ryzen 9 5900HX | 64GB | 2TB | RTX 3070 or for $2200 (on sale right now) a Razer Blade 14 with 6900HX |RTX 3070 Ti| 14" QHD 165Hz | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB, so those are what this is competing with, and those others come with Windows licenses too (it looks like the Vivobook MIGHT be available without an OS, but no word on what configurations offer that).
- 16" 3.2K 120 Hz OLED
Apparently part of the genius of the chip is that they baked a large chunk of the power management logic into the chip itself.
I think Linux has work it could do to be more efficient, but really we should just be mad at Intel/AMD for not doing what Apple did years ago. They never even offered an option for those willing to sacrifice compatibility. And now they're going to start looking the entire portable electronics market (little bit hyperbole, but I don't see my self buying any new computer that isn't an M1 something for a long time especially as Asahi Linux is making such good progress and I can use Linux on whatever Apple releases in the future).
[1]: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1592508953933778945?s=20...
I'll stick to second-hand thinkpads for now, but I'd really like to have a thinkpad with some ARM resembling M1.
We had a good shot with frame.work but it seems nobody is going to make other boards nor are keyboards really replaceable with thinkpad-like keyboards, so the swappable parts concept falls very short for now.
Or see what happens when you use Chrome or Firefox instead of Safari on a MacBook. One of these three vendors plainly cares a lot about battery life. The other two do not care as much.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsi...
By breaking background services more and more with every release. By doing less, your battery lasts longer, but for what if you want to make use of that battery? (I'm an Android user because iOS is simply not an option for tinkering, but I am sour about the breakage with every version.)
I don’t know, just the other day I saw someone warning against falling for M1/M2 for StableDiffusion inference(people buy new computers to run SD apparently!), claiming that same code take two orders of magnitude longer on M1/M2 against a 3080.
So maybe an M1/M2 Air isn’t faster than Intel(+NVIDIA) machine at TDP, maybe it’s magnificent that it’s only 100 times slower than a proper desktop, maybe it is still a lightweight ARM laptop, just (salivatingly) nice ones.
Apple tightly controls both software and hardware, and major Apple-provided software, such as Safari, is specifically optimized. Run Firefox on an M1, and see how much more battery it eats with the same tabs open.
Hence an Apple-only laptop has a spectacular battery life, which is reported. With real-world non-Apple software it could be a bit different, even though M1 CPU is really more energy-efficient than a mobile x86 CPU.
This is not touching the GPU anyway.
12700H has comparable single core performance and significantly faster multi core performance than M1.
It's seem to be about at the same level as M1 Pro/Ultra just with much poorer energy efficiency.
Also I'm not sure how mature performance/efficiency cores are supported on Linux right now.
Now I'm definitely spoiled by the Lenovo X1 series, but I'm not happy.
The hardware is a rebrand from clevo-computer.com - some minor spare parts can be had from there.
The system is VERY prone to overheating, the fan is noisy. They claim the fan noise is "not annoying" which is only true in the short term. I have opened up the bottom shell and I believe the fan recirculates a bit of hot air back into the case. This really is a limiting factor for me, I'm considering an alternate cooling solution.
The case had a minor chip in it within the first ten minutes out of the box (I don't know how that happened, I think it just pinged off by itself!). The palm-rests are starting to show dark spots. My barrel jack power connector is loose, I have to hold it in with a rubber band. (I still have the usb-c port) All the rubber feet at the bottom fell off quite some time ago, superglued them back on. The (super compact) PSU started to whine, that was replaced under warranty - but is stated to be a consumable item!
Out of the box they have their own OS, which is a somewhat modified Ubuntu. My main driver is Debian and almost everything worked right out of the box - sometimes I got back (usb-boot) to their distro to validate things (see: support).
The firmware is more than okay for me; I managed to cross-compile their "control centre" to allow me to change performance/fan characteristics on the fly. The uefi updates work fine (boot from a stick), but they are undocumented.
The support is ... rigid. The first response is to boot their own distro and kernel. This is fair for a mass market product I guess, but I somehow hoped that specific questions would find their way proper Linux Gurus (tm).
There is a very cute penguin instead of a windows logo on the keyboard :-)
Why are so many Linux laptops NVIDIA? It know that we have the OS kernel + blob userspace option now, but it's still early days. My desktop is AMD, my laptop is NVIDIA, and the difference is night-and-day.
I would honestly have an IGPU in a laptop over NVIDIA, but even that option seems few and far between (this specific laptop being an exception).
Yes, this ad says this computer is thin, but if you compare it to a commodity ultrabook from dell/hp/apple, it looks much thicker.
- Who is actually producing these? Are they resellers? For whom?
- They mention TuxedoOS. Why? Can you have the same experience with a vanilla Debian or Arch?
- Customs costs. They may inflate the price quite a lot depending on where you are
The energy required to move 80kg (me+bike) 25km is significant.
Meanwhile, gaming rigs are coming with kilowatt power supplies now, maybe even more.
Laptops try to be more efficient, yeah, but 100 watt-hours in sixteen hours is 6.25 watts sustained.
Did I math that properly?
My Lenovo gaming laptop gets 5-6 hours with a 4th gen AMD H-series on a 60Wh battery.
The obvious is TSMC's "7nm" and iterative 6nm enables greater efficiency over "Intel 7." Beyond that, presumably there's some IPC advantage that means more work can be done with the same clocks and power draw.
It's odd, because 12th gen is quite performant and seems efficient, and yet somehow the battery life isn't very good.
I had the 9 Cell battery (compared to the 3 cell) with the additional backpack chassis battery that clipped on below.
Just by itself the 9 cell was good for close to 10 hours.
Extended battery was: 64.38Wh and the extended 9 cell was 94Wh.
About a decade down the road, I still have about 50% battery life left in it at max charge and it still holds its own on an all day outing
Though, to be fair, this one had an HDD originally and has an "HDAPS" system. It's a built in gyroscope that will park the head of the disk if it notices the laptop is in free fall. how silly and fantastic that is
The backside of this magazine is a full-page ad for this exact laptop.
[1]: " c't Make: Sonderheft Elektro-Technik " https://www.heise.de/select/make/2022/7
[2]: Seriously, 12,90€ for one edition is IMHO too much to just buy every single one without all the content being something I'm really interested in.
It's easy if you change the parameters.
24 Wh built-in with unlimited hot-swap 72 Wh batteries, pretty much 96 Wh + 72Wh * N.
Got anything constructive to add?
The speakers point DOWNWARDS!
They're supposed to be pointing upwards, towards where your ears are supposed to be.
The downwards pointing speakers are a good fit for 2 in 1 laptops, that transform into tablets, as the most common usage of those is to fold them over, therefore pointing the speakers towards yourself.
But not LAPtops. These either sit on a desk, directing the sound towards plywood, or if you use them in bed, or on top of a blanket (when not working and using it as a personal device), sound getting muffled by the fabric.
I've tested ones of the tuxedo laptops we bough a while back that has the same flaw. The sound muffling is not that big, but it is noticeable, compared to my HP laptop with speakers next to the screen above the keyboard. And of course, compared to a macbook, it sounds horrible.
Bad speaker placement and bad speaker quality. I guess it's OK for work purposes but if you want to use it as a personal device that you want to enjoy during your past time, you, just like me, will get frustrated.
Work gives me an elite book and while it’s much better than most, it’s still bad. The whole case resonates and adds noise and it runs some shitty software that uses 30% cpu to make it sound decent. Disabling that software brings it back to average laptop levels.
Coming from Macbook I'm pretty happy with it. I got used very fast with KDE (I used it on desktop computer in the recent years from time to time). Touchpad it's great, keyboard is the same as on Macbook. Battery lasts about 5h now when programming (some Node.JS, compiling some Rust or Go services).
I had a 2016 Macbook Pro 15 with I7 and 16gbRAM, now it compiles a Rust service I'm working on in 1 minute compared to 6 minutes on the old laptop.
The laptop specs I'm having is the same as the Tuxedo and the same chassis: i7-12700H, 16gb Ram(updated it to 40gb myself), 512gb NvMe, 99wh Battery.
Tongfangs tend to be quite a bit better than Clevo also.
45W - yes, minimum 35W but 45W much more likely in default settings.
But yes I would worry about cooling in a 14" form factor with an Intel "45W" CPU that supports a peak of 115W.
1.0 Megapixel webcam!
In this age of video calling that's hardly acceptable, it's an unfortunately huge downside to what seems like an otherwise great device.
Seriously, why don't laptop makers understand that a "workstation" needs a decent non-chicklet keyboard?
While they still have a ways to go, I'm more hopeful for Framework since they do their own engineering, and I'm interested to see what system76 does in the self-designed laptop they're reportedly working on.
The AMD cpu model I'm using for work is really quite good on power and fast (Ryzen 7 5700u).
Sending a laptop back for warranty repair is a massive pain as well. I ended up just working around the broken stuff until I bought a new machine.
Linux will never be a mainstream option with these low effort products.
- They only mention production in Germany. Their "Why Tuxedo" page[1] does seem to imply that they are building most of it themselves.
- They mention TuxedoOS for the same reason System76 mentions Pop_OS!: because they made it. I would expect it to work with any one of the OS included in their WebFAI[2] pretty well[3], which by the way I believe is actually sent with the laptop.
- Their FAQ might shed some light here[4] depending on where you live. It's pretty much the same with any brand I know; maybe you have had a different experience?
[1] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/why-TUXEDO.tuxedo#tuxedo-...
[2] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-WebFAI.tuxedo
[3] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Freque...
[4] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Freque...
AFAIK they only sell rebadged Clevo products. You should be able to get any of their laptops on https://clevo-computer.com/en/laptops-configurator/ just without the badge.
TuxedoOS was very limiting to me; a vanilla Debian works very well.
[G] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/Help-Support/Freque...
Why would I want power saving modes?
So no..
I know next to nothing about ML. But even I can follow basic instructions to get Stable Diffusion or Spleeter or something to play with.
Installation, configuration and speed to get ML stuff to play with is easy for nVidia users. Sucks for AMD.
Source: current AMD GPU user who dislikes nGreedia but sees no other real option.
I got it for half the price of equivalent hardware in a MacBook Pro (8-cores/16 threads, 64 gb ram, 3 TB NVME storage, monster graphics card.)
The X13s can run Linux fairly well right now, so it's promising.
IMHO, ARM CPUs are going to eat the low and mid-end laptop market due to their energy-saving advantage.
It's undocumented, yes - but it's not like it wasn't there.
Do you know how I can check if the discrete card is being used / drawing power?
I wrote a script to query that data and output it in a format compatible with i3status. In case you'd like to see how it works:
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.loca...
Please share the changes if you figure out an AMD solution. I'm curious.
Come on...
That's like saying: this piece of software is great but only under very specific conditions, everything else is non standard and you can't complain.
If the OEM provides spec/drivers/assistance to microsoft and not to anybody else, yes, it's their fault.
Even more so if collaboration is done only under NDA. And it's been happening for decades.
(Pretty sad that nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff)
Also, no need for the snark.
> everything else is non standard and you can't complain.
No, you can first get a correct understanding and then complain to who is really responsible.
Again, no need for the snark.
You do know there are open and closed source drivers on Linux, right?
OEMs develop stuff for Linux as well, it's just that they don't have a lot of incentives to do it properly, since most of the user base is on another OS.
So no, it's not a hardware issue, the hardware is great. It's a software, business and culture issue that companies don't have incentives to develop consumer grade software for Linux and that Linux hasn't implemented proper performance/efficiently core support, proper egpu support, seamless hibrid graphics support, etc. Because all those tend to be stuff that the general consumer wants and not things servers would use.
I encourage you to explore more around what you say before disregarding other people's opinion with "nowadays HN does not even understand such basic stuff" when you yourself haven't even given it much thought, please. You don't need to be so snarky either.
Evidence so far indicates that they do not, when given the chance.
Dell and Lenovo generally do a pretty good job, and those machines sell well, but I think the quality is still below what, say, Apple can deliver. Judging by the push to get Linux to run on Apple hardware, I'd say Linux enthusiasts are not only willing to pay a premium for a quality product, but willing to invest time and effort getting it to run well in a hostile and closed ecosystem.
So I think there's a big market opportunity for someone to deliver Apple quality hardware, that integrates well with open source software. Framework is probably at the frontlines in this regard.
Framework is probably an exception but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of those who bought it still use Windows
I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: the smartest thing Apple ever did was keeping you from running OSX on Windows computers. Nobody buys a commodity PC, slaps OSX on it, and expects it to work as well or better than Windows. Yet this is how many do Linux.
I think the biggest thing is not having a discrete GPU.
[EDIT] And that's even true for Apple laptops, IME.
System76 does get complete hardware specs from the chipset manufacturer, though, and their cooperation in porting an open-source firmware to the motherboard. They run Coreboot instead of the proprietary OEM UEFIs, and this has let them achieve some nice things in power management (including MacBook-like instant on from sleep and hibernation, for example) on some models.
I'm still excited for the first systems where they get to do the physical design as well, but their firmware work on their rebadged laptops is substantial and relevant to the power efficiency issue.
I got all the extra USB features working. It should be possible to support everything else too. If I learn this I'll add support for all the laptops I buy in the future too.
It IS linux's fault, in the way that whenever someone new comes into the ecosystem and says "hey this important thing doesn't work well or is broken for me" and get accosted from all directions by crazy people who haven't touched mac or windows in 20 years who insist that what you describe isn't possible, linux is super easy to fix yourself (lol), and that ideas from computing in the 60s are unambiguously the best ideas ever made in computing.
The linux ecosystem doesn't even have a legitimate window manager. When people tell the linux world "hey there's an issue" the linux world always responds with "fuck off"
MacOS is especially bad because they don't even try to address their deficiencies. They just bandaid over it with an app ecosystem and then don't give that ecosystem an API that's to sufficient to do the job (e.g. the limitations of amethyst and amphetamine re: focus control and lid closing).
And that's before we get into intentionally missing features like focus-on-hover.
This is possible because the machine is basically a pure Intel device, so in-kernel support for most hardware components is good. The key aspect is to implement fairly aggressive udev rules and to use no desktop environment, so that the CPU stays in powersaving states for as long as possible. This is where Linux really shines, as X plus a window manager is much lighter than anything else.
There is still some room for improvement with a custom kernel, a custom Firefox build or a better wireless card, the only non-Intel component. Broadcom Linux drivers are awful. Also Safari is a marvel in terms of efficiency.
> The key aspect is to [...] use no desktop environment, [...]
Is this satire?
As an example, IMO an idle computer should have all CPU save one or two at 0% utilization, and that remaining CPU(s) shouldn't be averaging more than a few percent, in short spiky bursts. FreeBSD or Debian are like this, but Ubuntu is not.
Why do people write comments like this as though it's reasonable way to use an everyday driver PC?
"I don't use a DE" - well then yes, obviously but you've also removed like 80% of the functionality to turn the thing into a dumb console. That's not what I want to use a computer for.
The rest is largely correct, but this part is completely wrong. Linux has a bunch of legitimate window managers, most of them much better than MacOSX or Windows.
The problems with window managers on Linux are: 1) fragmentation: there's a bunch of them, all competing with each other, but with insufficient dev resources, so they all feel half-baked, 2) unreliability: because of #1, they have a lot of bugs 3) churn: with Gnome and KDE specifically, they keep throwing things out just as they finally make their product mature and starting over every so often, subjecting users to systems that are never really mature or reliable.
I love my Macbook, but really wish they'd borrow some ideas from Windows and Linux
Let alone arcane tech like "search in list of open windows"
You just have to recompile the kernal.
Linux just is worse on battery than any of the other mainstream OSs in my experience, though the margin has reduced over time. It's still my platform of choice (because even now, in 2022, the choices available are crap), but denial makes them disappear only from the imagination, not reality.
> It's not Linux's fault per se, it's just that there's considerably less engineering manpower going into tuning the power efficiency of laptop hardware on Linux.
You're not wrong, but it's worse than that. A lot of the power management is tied in to proprietary firmware. Then there's the whole Intel Gen12 debacle...
I would argue that Chromebooks are pretty solid proof that it isn't Linux's fault, because they by and large Linux systems that get fantastic power management results.
> People get up in arms because they can't reconcile the fact that "Windows is bloated" with the fact that it gets better battery life, but if you think about it for a few seconds it really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Windows gets better battery life on laptops designed for better battery life with Windows. At the same time, it is often surprising how running a program under WINE on Linux will outperform the same program running on Windows. ;-)
Sorry, that should read:
"I would argue that Chromebooks are pretty solid proof that it isn't Linux's fault, because they are Linux systems that by and large get fantastic power management results.
The firmware involved is also distinctly non-trivial.
Even if those laptops don't support Linux as well as they claim to, it seems like it'd be less of a headache to deal with than Framework with their unique dongle situation.
Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only).
Under light load the system is using 6-8w (about 9-10h of usage on the 80WH battery), under 4w when completely idle. This is latest Fedora on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme with KDE. I want to see that with Windows.
You have to invest a bit more time with Linux (for example the fingerprint reader on my Laptop prevented the CPU from going into lower power modes), and that part is unfortunate.
On the other hand I never experience things randomly not working like it was with Windows.
Your mileage may vary.
Ships with Linux, some good marketing. I think PopOS! has lost the thread on why they exist, in that it started as an 'it just works' version of linux, and it seems to be managed as yet another enthusiast grade linux. It doesn't take much time over at r/popos to see this sentiment spelled out.
I'm not leaving the linux ecosystem, but I can tell you i'd be shocked if I go with either Framework again. Majorly disappointed for what should have been a top tier system when I bought it. I'm on the fence about PopOS. I need an OS that works out of the gate and doesn't break things like audio and bluetooth down the road (both of which are borked in the current version).
Idk. Hard time to be committed to FOSS, but the options aren't better.
I had Motile M141 laptop with Ryzen 3200U and it had better battery life on Linux than Windows.
800MHz would be more than enough processing power for most things I do. Just about virtually everything we do now, we were doing when 400MHz Celerons existed.
Nobody does efficient coding any longer.
The framework laptop would also seem to suffer from using user-replaceable DDR4 instead of, say, LPDDR5 like 12th gen compatriots generally do (higher performance, less power).
Sorry, but that's not a good argument in favor of Linux when basic power management is not part of the OS and you need to set it up yourself manually. Can you imagine Microsoft or Apple shipping their OSs without power management? I need an OS to work out of the box so I can get to work/entertainment, not a hobby to tinker with. I still enjoy tinkering with Linux but it should be only when I want-to, not a need-to.
> I want to see that with Windows.
Yeah, you can get Linux to be more economical than Windows by manually installing a bunch of tools that throttle down the CPU into its lowest power mode and running it at 600MHz fixed all the time, and now you have a laptop that's super slow, all for the sake of battery life and winning online arguments. Good job. /s You can force that in Windows as well, but why would you?
I want to see Linux automatically scale the CPU power and frequency based on the load put on it like Windows does: idles at 600MHz when doing nothing, click on the Firefox tab and it shoots up to 3,6GHz, then back down to 800MHz. That's what any sane OS should do out of the box, not have you install and fiddle with a bunch of tools and maybe still not be as good.
>On the other hand I never experience things randomly not working like it was with Windows.
I have way more things randomly not working on Ubuntu 22.04 Gnome at work than on Windows 11 at home (none actually on this one).
And I'm saying this an Linux/FOSS user and fan.
That entirely depends on the distro you use. Any "mainstream" distro should already have power saving tools set up properly. Of course if you use something more DIY like Arch you will have to set those up yourself. You can't just group every distro together as "Linux" when you will get a different experience on each one.
> I want to see Linux automatically scale the CPU power and frequency based on the load put on it like Windows does: idles at 600MHz when doing nothing, click on the Firefox tab and it shoots up to 3,6GHz, then back down to 800MHz. That's what any sane OS should do out of the box, not have you install and fiddle with a bunch of tools and maybe still not be as good.
Unless you are using the performance or powersave governors (except with intel-pstate active) that's already what it should be doing. Once again you shouldn't have to tinker with that stuff on any sane distro.
My experience with Wayland has been very solid within the last year or so I've been on it exclusively but it's definitely implementation dependent. You're right you shouldn't have to know about these things and I certainly get the sense that's the goal. I mean one disadvantage of a system being developed in the open is that things aren't necessarily 'released' as such when 'ready'. They're in the open for people to adopt/or not, many times still rapidly evolving.
I value this approach but it's certainly not for everyone.
> It should be a tool, not a lifestyle or ideology.
That's...a very subjective statement? I think free software definitely has its place as an ideology if you will, if people want to live by it and are willing to put with the downsides why not? Some people are in it to preserve general purpose computing for the next generation let's say. I see that as completely valid since nobody forces you to use their output.
But given how expensive the Apple ecosystem is, I would certainly not expect things like having to know that poll() will not work correctly after an update[1], if it's indeed just a tool.
Plenty of regular people have to get at least somewhat familiar with the Windows Registry for example.
Point is, in this industry these sorts of things happen and so you do end up having to know about certain internal inner workings of the system you're working on one way or another. It's obviously more of a case on a system developed in the open but not exclusively.
1 - https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/11/poll-on-mac-10-12-is-...
OK, the thing is that even on sane distros, if you don't tinker them, out of the box, they have less battery life than on Windows on many machines. Out of the box Linux is just not that great with battery life.
I use Gentoo on a Dell Precision laptop and I do not see any battery lifetime difference between it and Windows.
However, I do not doubt that with other Linux distributions or with a Gentoo that has a very different configuration, the results would not be the same.
I think that it is very wrong to say that a laptop with Linux has a worse battery life than one with Windows, but it is right to say that in many cases a laptop with Linux needs an experienced user to configure it properly, in order to have the same battery life that it would have with Windows out of the box.
On the other hand, when installing Windows 10 Enterprise on embedded computers, I have encountered many cases when Linux had great performance in a default installation, while with Windows 10 I had to waste many days with tuning, e.g. with discovering that certain services must be disabled, until obtaining an acceptable performance.
I imagine Xfce or even GNOME 3 can be tweaked a bit to be almost equally energy efficient.
Would love to see what it would take.
> I have all services a modern desktop has
LMAO
I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.
Before making offensive comments, have you thought about the meaning of my statement?
For example, a modern DE offers desktop notifications. I still have that by running a desktop notification daemon, dunst, despite just using X plus a window manager but no DE.
Linux is very much broken into small composable components, the same way Clojure is. To take this comparison further, it is extremely ignorant to claim you can't have the same functionality Rails offers just because you don't use a big framework (which is the equivalent to a DE).
Also something like XFCE will still get you the graphical things to fondle without as much power usage as GNOME. The problem is really those (especially GNOME) pissing on performance and thus power usage
What was I missing? Probably a start menu / launcher (but I guess it can be installed and run anyway) and a control panel for settings.
Which modern software won't run in such a setup? Maybe dbus? Systemd? I think a lot of GUI software would still run, some won't, daemons and servers probably would.
Is this something for the nerdiest 1% of the nerdiest 1%? Definitely. I won't do that myself because it's too much of a hassle and I'll probably have to revert to a standard DE to run some software I need for work, but it will work, mostly.
Could you please share some details on all these Windows GUI bugs?
1. Every once in a while, when I move a browser tab into a new window, the window spawns entirely off screen. At least that's what I think. It's completely invisible, but I can focus it and bring up the Alt-Space menu, which shows up in a random screen corner. I can start moving it, but it never moves into view. I just cannot get a hold of it. Only fix is to close the window and try to get back to the open webpage manually. It feels like this happens most often with Youtube tabs where a video is playing.
2. I have FancyZones set up (using PowerToys, i.e. an official MS tool). When a window is snapped to one of these zones, and I minimize it and bring it up again, there is a chance that it has a baffling white border around it that sticks with it while resizing. Only fix is to maximize the window, then snap it back into the zone.
3. Something that I've seen from time to time with different applications (when it's with my browser, it may be related to 1, but it happens with e.g. notepad too): There is a chance that new windows open up in just the most baffling geometries. For example, Notepad opening up at ~6000px width, stretching across most of my two screens' combined width. Or, particularly irritating, browser windows coming up at what must be ~10000px width and height, with the top way above the top edge of either screen, so I can only use Alt-Space -> Maximize to grab a hold of it.
4. Windows spawning on one screen, but using DPI ratio of the other screen, so either cartoonishly small or cartoonishly large. The one that comes to mind the most is the Outlook calendar reminder popup, but I think I've seen other apps suffering from this too.
You can run bare X or Wayland, plus a window manager and cherry-picked daemons, to achieve the same sort of functionality e.g. desktop notifications, network roaming or device automounting.
My point is that bare X plus cherry-picked services tends to be much more efficient, because you don't need to pay a performance tax for the things you don't use.
Windows: Battery life sucks, we'll try to improve the software and maybe use a different CPU
Linux: Just turn off your desktop and recreate its functionality using a dozen command line daemons and selectively run graphics only when you need it. It worked in DOS, why not now?
lol and we wonder why desktop Linux never came...
I've seen a lot of Linux apologetics over the years, but this is the single funniest comment I've ever read on the topic
Sure, the setup might require some skill, but professional, high quality tools always do.