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Monster battery life with Linux

Well, I don't know about Linux, but when I have Windows or OSX booted and have it in suspend mode I can last for days on one battery charge! That's about as functional as letting it sit idle. :D



I've run Linux off and on for eleven years. I came to OSX because I consider it *nix perfected. I don't think you will be able to extend battery use in any functional way that you couldn't already achieve in OSX. It's all reduced down to a numbers game at this point. Reduce the screen backlight as much as possible, you will extend your battery. Kill bluetooth, you will extend your battery. Let it sit idle and not do anything, you will extend your battery. Yes, you can get more than seven hours on battery, but you will be sacrificing your user experience to do so.

If you insist on trying to do this might I also suggest FreeBSD, dark colors, kill all radios not in use, four ticks of brightness, no GUI (or manual run when you want/need an X window session)? You can probably get to 10-11 hours of "usable" run time, depending upon your tasks.
 
The original post isn't reliable for a few reasons.

Other programs are claimed to be running but there is no given evidence for this, only a screenshot of the light weight terminal. Also as another poster mentioned, the battery life when idle is irrelevant because it isn't applicable to real use.

Secondly Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux which anyone who is new to the platform would be able to use. If we presuppose that the results are true then under the conditions you mentioned, a specifically configured kernel and settings, then it would be so technical as to be too convoluted for most users to do. Which to me says that this is just e-peening.
 
RichardBeer said:
Secondly Gentoo is not a distribution of Linux which anyone who is new to the platform would be able to use. If we presuppose that the results are true then under the conditions you mentioned, a specifically configured kernel and settings, then it would be so technical as to be too convoluted for most users to do. Which to me says that this is just e-peening.
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Just because noobs won't be able to use it doesn't mean it's not credible. :rolleyes:

If a computer noob needs an OS, that's what OSX is for. :p:D
 
Risasi said:
Well, I don't know about Linux, but when I have Windows or OSX booted and have it in suspend mode I can last for days on one battery charge! That's about as functional as letting it sit idle. :D
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The idle state is a point of reference, to compare to the same state in OS X.

Risasi said:
I've run Linux off and on for eleven years. I came to OSX because I consider it *nix perfected.
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Now that I'm trying to optimize power usage, I realize that OS X really is close to perfect. Matching or outperforming it is very difficult, but I'm learning so much that it's worth it. The black box is becoming more transparent by the day :cool:.

Risasi said:
I don't think you will be able to extend battery use in any functional way that you couldn't already achieve in OSX. It's all reduced down to a numbers game at this point. Reduce the screen backlight as much as possible, you will extend your battery. Kill bluetooth, you will extend your battery. Let it sit idle and not do anything, you will extend your battery. Yes, you can get more than seven hours on battery, but you will be sacrificing your user experience to do so.

If you insist on trying to do this might I also suggest FreeBSD, dark colors, kill all radios not in use, four ticks of brightness, no GUI (or manual run when you want/need an X window session)? You can probably get to 10-11 hours of "usable" run time, depending upon your tasks.
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The comparison (12 hours vs. 11 hours) with Wi-Fi on and a window manager running in both. In OS X (11 hours) was with no applications launched. Linux (12 hours) was with an idle instance of Chromium. No sacrifice in this particular case.

And I expect that once I try playing a 720p H.264 video in VLC under both OSes, Linux will outlast OS X by a respectable margin given the support for hardware H.264 decoding.

RichardBeer said:
Other programs are claimed to be running but there is no given evidence for this, only a screenshot of the light weight terminal.
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cleric said:
http://funroll-loops.info/
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Thanks for the link! It's amazing that people actually took the time to collect such quotes. They must have done this on the time they saved not compiling their packages :D.
 
nexsta said:
Who cares about the battery life in idle?
Test this on [...] video playback and then lets see the difference between osx and linux.
Click to expand...

You got it ;).

720p - Linux
x264 video, MKV container, muted, from SSD (ext4 on LVM), Wi-Fi

  • VLC, HW accel off: ~3h45 (there must be room for improvement as the video was choppy, surprising for VLC)
  • mplayer2, HW accel off: ~4h45
  • mplayer2, HW accel on: ~6h35
Linux VLC SW, mplayer2 SW, mplayer2 HW:


720p - Mac OS X
Same, from SSD (HFS+), Wi-Fi

  • VLC, HW accel incompatible: 4h38
 
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A little update, regarding Linux on a late 2010 MBA:

Done:
  • Slim kernel v3.1.0+, all devices recognized and working
  • Low power consumption: proprietary nvidia drivers (every other drivers are open-source), phc-intel, frequency scaling, optimizations on battery
  • Suspend / restore to / from RAM on lid close / open
  • Dual boot, boot on Linux by default
  • Start X on boot as a certain user
  • Touchpad, two-finger horizontal and vertical scrolling, natural scrolling, OS X-like pointer precision and acceleration
In progress:
  • Suspend / restore to / from disk on low battery or on demand
  • Smoother scrolling
  • Scrolling easing and momentum (inertia)
  • Keyboard controlled volume, brightness, power-off, and maybe CMD <=> CTRL inversion
  • Centralized, git-backed configuration files and scripts, ebuild to install everything in a managed way
The plan is package the centralized config. files, scripts and guides for OS install and post-install, into a git repository. The guide would be a simple static site generated out of Markdown files. All hosted on GitHub.

At first, the master branch of this repo would be targeted for the MBA3,1 and 3,2 (late 2010, 11" and 13"), and forked for MBA4,1 and 4,2, since the differences should be minimal (off the top of my head: more Intel CPU features to enable in the kernel including RC6 power usage optimization, nvidia => i915, keyboard backlight control). And anyone would be able to fork either branch to either customize them or to contribute.
 
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eric/ said:
I get 6-7 hours of battery life using the Air on OSX.
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eric/ said:
Regular usage with the brightness turned down a bit, music on/off randomly and wireless+bluetooth on.
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You're lucky, I could never get that long of battery life with any of my MBAs (late 2010, mid 2011) under OS X.

But for this usage, I have a good feeling about Linux. Yesterday, the old late 2010 lasted ~8h30, from ~11am to ~7:30pm, serving an SSH session over Wi-Fi the whole time, editing text files, but also a bit of web browsing, compiling packages from time to time (which maxes out the two cores), and watching two 40 minutes shows (one 720p, one low quality XviD). Playing music shouldn't be a big deal either, especially through the lightweight mpd (Music Playing Daemon) :D.

Can't wait to give the Sandy Bridge a try.
 
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You choose the OS based on that application software you need to run. Try as you want but you can't run Garage Band on Linux, not can you run Adobe Photoshop on Linux. max OS will run most Linnux software if you are willing to build from source code.

I've been using Linus for ages from the days what Slackware cam on a stack of floppy disks and I run it on a 386. I use Linux fulltime at work. However I got Mac OS so I can run Logic and Aperture and related Apple software

Ubuntu is actually so much like Mac OS that you can't argue which is "best". Just run the OS that lets you run the software you need to run
 
@ChrisA
Software choice is definitely a factor while picking OSes, but in the case of Linux, what I love is its flexibility, openness (no black boxes, no defaults shoved down your throat) and active development of both the kernel and apps.

A good example of this is the window manager: you're not stuck with OS X's one and only, as good as it is, or the questionable choices being made with each iteration. In Linux, such a situation can't even happen. Large selection of open-source window managers available: try them out, choose one, knowing that if developers make bad choices, you can override them, fork or use a forked version, or just switch to another one altogether.

In my case, with time, I found myself wasting time resizing and aligning windows to maximize work space. There are solutions in OS X, but they're just more like workarounds. In Linux, or any OS that X11 runs on, there's a full blown tiling window manager, XMonad, which is lightweight, robust, fully configurable, does one thing and does it well. (Maybe that wasn't such a good example as there's an X11 server for OS X so XMonad runs on it, but the idea applies to all kinds of software ;)). SInce I use it, I have adjusted to the whole tiling concept so much that now I have trouble manipulating all those tiny windows spread around archaically in OS X and other WMs in Linux :D.
 
Skika said:
Thats such a sad way of looking at things.
Click to expand...

Not looking at things superficially is sad ? :rolleyes:

We're talking electronics here, things with a purpose, tools. I'd rather a useful tool than a pretty tool. And frankly, if the tool is useful, I don't really care what it looks like.

----------
Les Kern said:
Pbbbt.... Linux.

Why does a dog lick itself?
Because it can, not because it should.
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If you don't like Linux, please don't read or post in threads about it. :rolleyes:

Why do some people feel threatened by the choices of others that they feel the need to spew hate ?
 
One buys a Mac just to run OSX.

Where this would be interesting is on the Aspire S3, as it uses a normal form factor drive, the way it should be, but it is saddled by Windows.
 
I think Linux is a really cool OS to run different services on, such as video streaming, FTP, etc. But on my MacBook Air, I prefer to run OS X.
 
Excellent! I am an Ubuntu user, but you're way out of my league. This should be clear, for a common user to get to the level of compiling your OS needs deep understanding of how it works and the ability to make FULL use of its features. It is true that if you want the best performance there is not a better option.

Keep up with the good work :D, I was waiting to see this kind of testing with Ubuntu, If I can squeeze even 30 more minutes on Ubuntu I will change to it right away. My current use of the MBA is very simple, so I really could benefit on the possibility of undervolting a SNB CPU, but I don't know if that's even possible, to have the possibility of controlling the CPU speed and voltage would be an amazing battery saving feature.
 
I don't really see the point to this. You can get the exact same hardware and install linux on it for probably 10x cheaper. One of the reasons you get a mac is the OS.
 
torbjoern said:
I think Linux is a really cool OS to run different services on, such as video streaming, FTP, etc. But on my MacBook Air, I prefer to run OS X.
Click to expand...
Linux is excellent for servers, but it's also very capable on the desktop side. Sure, there's no full desktop suite as polished as OS X, but all the tools exist to make one that's precisely tailored to one's needs.

There's always the easy route (generic, but turn-key solutions like Ubuntu), but it's so worth it to do it all yourself! Actually, I'm currently working to not only make a perfect configuration for myself, but also make it easy for anyone else to do the same. It will be open-source documentation + set of config. files and scripts. I'll update this thread in time.

castillo4141 said:
Excellent! I am an Ubuntu user, but you're way out of my league. This should be clear, for a common user to get to the level of compiling your OS needs deep understanding of how it works and the ability to make FULL use of its features. It is true that if you want the best performance there is not a better option.
Click to expand...
What's so good about Gentoo, is that compiling packages (like programs and libraries) is transparent to you, so you get the benefits without the drawbacks. Namely, you get software with only the functionality you need, binaries tailored to your CPU, all dependencies pulled down automatically, but no messed up filesytem because of blind "make install"s, no hair-pulling because of dependencies (though one learns a lot from that too).

Keep up with the good work :D, I was waiting to see this kind of testing with Ubuntu, If I can squeeze even 30 more minutes on Ubuntu I will change to it right away. My current use of the MBA is very simple, so I really could benefit on the possibility of undervolting a SNB CPU, but I don't know if that's even possible, to have the possibility of controlling the CPU speed and voltage would be an amazing battery saving feature.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, SB undervolting is not possible yet. phc-intel is for older generations (Centrino, Atom, Core 1 & 2). Lots of other battery saving features though ;).

gentlefury said:
I don't really see the point to this. You can get the exact same hardware and install linux on it for probably 10x cheaper. One of the reasons you get a mac is the OS.
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As much I like OS X, and didn't plan to switch away from it, when originally choosing the MBA, I chose it for the hardware.

Of course there are alternatives, but nowhere near as high quality (cleanliness, robustness, attention to details) not even now (years after the launch of the current design), not even in the same price range, and not even above! Scary but true. They all smell like design by committee to me.

Even in hell if I had to put up with Windows, I would still buy an MBA over any other alternative that I know of (and I have looked around, a lot...).
 
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