Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor? 907
Ganty writes "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life."
Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is your screensaver running SETI?
Probably not a good idea if you want to conserve battery life.
power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:1, Insightful)
I've had the complete opposite experience running stock Ubuntu and Windows XP. As the World of Warcraft community would say "Obvious troll is ... Obvious". So please provide actual data (youtube videos, screenshots, your kernels .config file, all your XP tweeks you are using, etc), or this is just speculation.
XP netbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is a popular choice for netbooks, where battery life is paramount.
You mean "was", until Microsoft decided to keep Windows XP alive in the North American market for a few more years at bargain-basement prices per copy.
Just one instance of a known problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just the same problem Noted in XKCD [xkcd.com].
Good battery life is not cool. Open source software, especially a mutt like linux, is all about cool.
Good battery life requires annoyingly huge amounts of microoptimizations and chipset-dependent tricks. Which is most definatly NOT cool.
Re:RTFM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Go a step further - if you have enough RAM, copy the file to a RAM disk and let the disk spin down.
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
This post is exactly what is wrong with Linux advocates. Instead of answering the question - why does Linux die when watching DVDs where other OSes don't - the GP blames the user and suggests another, harder way to do the same thing.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Insightful)
And I get 7-8 hours on ubuntu with my netbook. ... but I get 10 hours in WinXP, and that's the point. We need a comparison.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you the movie ripped to a file, just copy it to a flash drive (or a SD card if your notebook has a reader). Then you don't have to worry about either the DVD drive or the hard drive motor using up power (assuming you have a traditional hard drive to begin with as many netbooks use flash-based ones now).
Re:Ditch Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
We need a -1 TrollFeeder option
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
What is there not to understand? Install Windows XP, measure battery life. Install Ubuntu, measure battery life. Find why Ubuntu sucks more power for the same job.
All this "provide your config" babble is just cover-up. Windows XP has superior battery life, out of the box and with tweaks. Battery life is one of the most important metrics for mobile devices, so it isn't far fetched to conclude that desktop distributions of Linux are inferior on mobile devices. Now get to work and stop the scapegoating.
Re:power management (Score:2, Insightful)
We all already spend a few grand a year for each student for this goal. We are forced to, on pain of going to jail if we don't.
The DC public school district, for example, spends close to $12,000/year per student, and has some of the highest rates of illiteracy, drop outs, and useless students by the time they are socially pushed through the system. When the same parents in that area are given the option of charter or private schools, they stand in line for three days in hopes of getting such a slot for their kids. The public system is - just like all government options - plagued by politics, inefficiency, unaccountability, and the iron fist of lefty labor unions that protect the worst of the worst who work in the system. Yes, please make sure that health care is handled the same way. That would be great.
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:1, Insightful)
Because ripping your legally owned DVDs is illegal in some counties!
Re:Do you have non anecdotal evidence? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oare we talking notebooks or netbooks? Linux on my netbook had a lot more battery life then XP or OSX on the same netbook. Win 7 may beat it or be close. haven't fully tested it yet. It could also be that the SSD drive is liked more by Linux then XP for me.
But have others have said, are the power saving setting turned on? I thought those were turned off by default. Is it even a fair test? Are both machines the same? Both OS set to turn the same things off?
Re:Do you have non anecdotal evidence? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Powertop (Score:4, Insightful)
But the problem still is: On windows, it has tons of background stuff active, you use the mouse, you have a colorful UI with FX, and full brightness, while your wlan scans the surroundings, and you *sill* get nearly as much battery life. Something is wrong there...
Re:Just one instance of a known problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, power saving is all about very detailed specs on how a chip can be powered down while in different states. Oh sure from the user side it might look like a simple low-high slider but in practise it's dynamically changing clock speeds, voltages, disabling parts of the chip and so on. I've been following the AMD open source driver development and basicly for full power management you'll need a whole new documentation package. They're still working on making it work right under full speed before power management will be a big priority.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do you have non anecdotal evidence? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardware specifically designed for the OS...
As far as I know, Windows does not tailor it's code to all Dell, Lenovo, Gateway, HP, and Asus laptops.
Come on, you refute your own argument. Hardware manufacturers do design their laptops to play well with Windows, in general. It is only recently that they have even considered installing linux as a feature. Most of them are probably still way behind on making their hardware play well with Linux. The main complaint I always hear about Linux is about having to do fancy things to make drivers work. So all comparisons are valid.
Re:Just one instance of a known problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just the same problem Noted in XKCD [xkcd.com].
Good battery life is not cool. Open source software, especially a mutt like linux, is all about cool.
Good battery life requires annoyingly huge amounts of microoptimizations and chipset-dependent tricks. Which is most definatly NOT cool.
Incorrect, at least in this case.
This problem has nothing to do with whether it is cool or not to squeeze and extra hour or two out of your notebook... This problem has to do with hardware support.
Linux developers continue to have trouble getting access to the hardware they need. Hardware developers are frequently unwilling to divulge the necessary secrets for F/OSS developers to write good drivers... And those same hardware developers are frequently unwilling to devote the time/money/effort necessary to write good drivers themselves...
So you wind up with half-crippled hardware under Linux. You get video cards, motherboards, hard drives, motherboards, etc. that won't properly spin down or hibernate or sleep or whatever.
Other folks in this thread have mentioned that this particular notebook ships with an ATI video card. ATI has notoriously crappy Linux support. This is a video card we're talking about... Geeks love video cards. It doesn't get much cooler than 3D graphics - look at all the time and effort going into projects like Compiz [compiz-fusion.org].
I can almost guarantee that if ATI would open up their documentation you'd see better battery life just as quickly as folks could code it.
Re:Do you have non anecdotal evidence? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is not multi (4+) core servers, but rather cheap laptops and netbooks.
And, anyway, lower power consumption and better efficiency will probably also benefit the "big iron".
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
And people expect an average computer user to want to use Linux when they have to make sure their kernel is compiled right to do basic power management?
No, you expect the average computer user to install the mobile or laptop version on a laptop, which come premade specifically with optimizations like these.
One size does NOT fit all.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
But why should the average user have to worry about tickless
after all other OSs figure out your hardware and install the right options. A distribution could worry about the user experience and take care of this automatically or, at worst, ask you if you are installing on a battery powered system.
There is utility in having one entity responsible for the ease of installation and not punting it to the varying knowledge/skill levels of the user.
If Microsoft and Apple can do it....
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:2, Insightful)
ACPI is a clusterfuck, that's why (Score:5, Insightful)
It is notoriously hard to work with power management features of notebooks, because it is hard to find a really ACPI-compatible BIOS. Most of them are broken in some way, or require undocumented voodoo and magic values to behave. There is really no solution to this unless: a) Manufacturers get their shit together and ship functioning hardware, not hardware that accidentally happens to work under Windows (systemic approach); b) Linux gets more mindshare and those issues get sorted out on a per-device basis (band-aid approach). a) is very unlikely, since shipping functioning hardware brings no obvious reward to the manufacturer. Therefore we can only hope for b).
Note that this is not limited to ACPI. In almost every area, there are hardware products that do not comply with specifications they are supposed to comply with, lie about supported features when probed, have bogus device descriptors, reuse the product ID of a different device, do stupid things when supplied valid commands it doesn't expect, etc.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you? Really? Cause I have been using Linux exclusively for my servers, desktops and notebooks for years and I didn't know there was a "laptop" ubuntu. Or suse. Or redhat.
Actually, I still don't know that. But I will take your word for it that something like that exists in some niche under a rock. Everything does. Linux distros are like porn on the net, if you can think of it, someone has done it. And heck, there are probably even supported ones from the three distros above maybe. Just I never heard of them because I haven't cared enough to look.
Which brings us to the odds of "the average computer user" having heard of them: Zero. Zip. None, Nil.
Plus, they have absolutely no conditioning for it, coming from either Mac or Win, where you don't need a magic special install to make your laptop work with your OS. You just do it.
So basically this isn't negating the OP's point, but instead reinforcing it. It is just another reason for people who aren't geeks to say: linux, I tried that but my battery life cut in half, so I put Win back on my machine.
Ubuntu - Inspiron 1720 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?
This is something that I see repeatedly when it comes to criticizing Linux. "I want to do X, and it doesn't [work as well|work at all]". Reply: "Why would you want to do that? That's not a good thing to do. You should do this instead." So in this: "I want to play a movie from disk, and the battery won't last." The response: "Don't play it from disk." This might be solving the user's immediate issue (if he has time/inclination to rip the disk ahead of time, and assuming that the battery isn't dying even when the DVD is not in use), but it also neatly avoids the need to address the actual problem (crap battery life).
I don't know that "jerkwad" is the right word, but "typical" surely is.
Missing The Point? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think many of the posters here, who all have great ideas and suggestions, are missing the point of the OP.
Why is an out-of-the-box XP machine performing better than an out-of-the-box Linux machine?
The Linux community shouldn't be saying "try this" or "tweak that" or "install this device driver" or "switch your hardware"... they should be working on building those into the next revs of the OS and making them part of the default configuration (or at least an easy prompt like XP offers).
Re:As one of the few (non-tech) lawyers..... (Score:2, Insightful)
The best choice for you depends on what you want.
From what you are saying, you are a lawyer who wants to get work done with a computer; you just want it to work. That argues for Mac OS X or Linux, IMHO.
If you buy a Windows laptop, it will come with all the drivers you need, pre-installed, and dialed in perfectly. It will also likely come with a whole bunch of useless junk helpfully pre-installed. It will also come with antivirus and antispyware software, and that is essential. So you can ignore the useless junk or strip it off, and make sure to keep your virus definitions updated. In Windows, everything you install has its own update manager, so from time to time Windows Update will need to run, the antivirus updater will need to run, Java (if you have it) has a really annoying updater... And Heaven help you if your machine does get some sort of malware that copies confidential data off your computer. And, it's getting harder to get old reliable XP; if you want to run Vista, you need a seriously powerful computer. (It is probably possible to turn off some background processes and strip out some cruft to make Vista better; and Windows 7 may be better; but for now, Vista can make a decent computer run slow.)
Note that the worst case scenario for Windows is a laptop being carried around and used in lots of different locations (coffee shops via WiFi, etc.) without a hardware firewall; that is the most likely way to get your computer infected with malware. Do you do this? If so, that argues against Windows.
With Mac OS X, you pay a bit more but everything Just Works. Fit and finish are mostly excellent. Lots of little things annoy me, so it hasn't seduced me away from Linux; for example, the fonts seem blurry [joelonsoftware.com] to me, the Finder doesn't seem as friendly as the file manager I'm used to (Nautilus in GNOME), etc. But if you want a computer that Just Works, and especially if you don't have good tech support, this is a great way to go.
With Linux, once the computer is correctly set up and working, you can just use it and use it and it Just Works. It may be some effort to get it there. But my wife is very much a non-techie, and she is perfectly content with her Ubuntu desktop that I set up for her. It really does Just Work.
So, if you are interested in Linux, one way to go would be to buy a complete computer with Linux pre-installed and supported by some company. For example, if you want a laptop, you could buy one from Emperor Linux [emperorlinux.com]. (I haven't bought from them, but they have been around for years, so they must be doing something right.)
The thing I like about Linux is that it always keeps getting better. It can be a rocky process (PulseAudio has had some serious growing pains, especially in my favorite distribution, Ubuntu) but overall it's working. Linux isn't getting slower as it improves; it stays the same or gets better, overall. (A modern distribution should run anywhere XP will run, and probably faster.)
So, get Linux if you like the way it looks and works (I find the GNOME desktop to be quite soothing and efficient and I love the virtual desktops feature). If you are a busy non-techie, get a turnkey pre-configured system, even if you need to pay more.
Get Mac OS X if you like the way it looks and works. It's not that much more expensive and it Just Works.
Get Windows if you don't mind having to do a lot of administration work (updating virus definitions, running virus scans, etc.). You are definitely swimming with the currents if you adopt the most popular OS available; you can get help and support anywhere. (But you are more likely to need that help and support, IMHO. I have friends and family who come to me with computer problems, and I don't much enjoy cleaning malware off an infected Windows computer, but I've had to do it plenty.)
Hope this helps.
steveha
Probably leaving hardware on (Score:3, Insightful)
It's incredibly hard to say because the summary doesn't provide enough detail in and of itself to diagnose the problem (e.g. which graphics card, which chipset, which drivers are being used, which version of Ubuntu and so on). The most likely explanation is that hardware is being left on in Linux that other OSes are powering down when on battery. Examples of this:
As you can a myriad of reasons and not nearly enough information to whittle down the cause. Further how do you know each OS is using the same defaults? It could be that Windows says you are running out of battery later than Linux does (I'd imagine that this sort of thing could only account for 10 minutes difference to actual empty battery though) or the display is defaulting to a different brightness - it could be that lots of little things are adding up to the major difference.
A few years ago I had access to a Thinkpad T60 and it would draw two watts less power under Windows XP than under Ubuntu Gutsy [ubuntu.com]. That doesn't mean things don't change over time but nor does it mean that people aren't seeing real problems now. If you know how to constructively help, things can get progressively better on your system but it can take some time and you need to know how to track these things down. Tools like powertop [lesswatts.org] help and developers have been putting together good power management practices for Linux guides [codon.org.uk]. However in all honesty posting to Slashdot is unlikely to help you obtain a solution (and indeed there is no guarantee of a solution even over a long period of time).
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet if you installed Windows Server 2008 on your laptop the battery life would kinda suck to; Server OSes tend to expect they'll be running balls to the wall ready to spawn new processes by the hundreds, not conserving a few mAHrs of battery life.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Claiming that Windows security is better than Linux is absurd enough. Claiming that it's better than Linux "by a few years" is so outlandish that it casts doubt on everything else you said.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you? Really? Cause I have been using Linux exclusively for my servers, desktops and notebooks for years and I didn't know there was a "laptop" ubuntu. Or suse. Or redhat.
Actually, I still don't know that. But I will take your word for it that something like that exists in some niche under a rock. Everything does. Linux distros are like porn on the net, if you can think of it, someone has done it. And heck, there are probably even supported ones from the three distros above maybe. Just I never heard of them because I haven't cared enough to look.
Which brings us to the odds of "the average computer user" having heard of them: Zero. Zip. None, Nil.
There are all kinds of laptop/netbook distros out there, quite high-profile ones. The big distros also have options available like laptop-mode. You can mock this if you like, but the average user might mock you for knowing about ubuntu or suse or redhat, too.
It's no surprise that laptop hardware, which is changing at an extraordinary rate in a short period of time, has some compatibility problems with FOSS distros. Only a very small handful of hardware manufacturers test for FOSS distros or provide information to FOSS developers to ensure decent compatibility; an even smaller number employs FOSS developers to ensure a high level of compatibility. These same hardware manufacturers work directly with Microsoft, divulging all of their "trade secrets". This post summarizes the issue well [slashdot.org].
Plus, they have absolutely no conditioning for it, coming from either Mac or Win, where you don't need a magic special install to make your laptop work with your OS. You just do it.
So basically this isn't negating the OP's point, but instead reinforcing it. It is just another reason for people who aren't geeks to say: linux, I tried that but my battery life cut in half, so I put Win back on my machine.
The "magic special install" you need for Mac OSX is an Apple computer. It better damn well work as advertised, since everything's coming from the same vendor (even so, I know OSX has had its share of problems on Apple's hardware). Microsoft, like Apple, has "magic special information" that is necessary to make hardware work correctly with software. Even so, we know Microsoft's record on this...they couldn't even get file copying right with Vista (something hardly magical).
Common scenario: Microsoft or Apple screws something up and the user says "well what're you gonna do?" and lives with it. A *nix distro screws something up and the user is up in arms, as if they'd been betrayed since they took the effort to switch to the distro in the first place.
All the documentation, community advice, workarounds, and solutions in the world may not help a user with that mindset, and there's not much the FOSS community can do about the problem. If hardware manufacturers start working more closely with the community, the situation will improve. And indeed it has over the years, immensely.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're basically asking for is "why can't this free software made by volunteers be as instantly capable with any hardware on the planet as the big corporate monopoly that spends zillions on the same thing"?
Do you now see the idiocy of the question?
No, I don't see the idiocy of the question. The answer gives an important insight into one reason why Linux isn't more successful on the desktop.
Users of computers don't care that Linux is partly made by volunteers. They want their computers to last as long as possible on a battery. They don't want to hear excuses about how Apple and Microsoft have better access to the hardware suppliers than the Linux developers. The fact is they do have better access and that leads to better power management.
I'm afraid you just have to find a way to deal with it. In fact, bleating that it's not fair because Linux developers are volunteers may make things worse. You're basically saying Linux is amateur. People want their software to be professional.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest objection to using Linux (and a major reason why I tell less technical friends/family to avoid Linux) is because of posts exactly like this.
My first Linux install was Slackware (if I remember correctly)...back in 1998. That's 10 years. And for all 10 of those years, my experience with Linux has been like this...
Linux Community: 'This new version of Linux is totally great. Easy to use, great hardware support, best Linux ever. Totally better than Windows!'
Me: "Ummm, that's cool and all - but I have a problem with X"
Linux Community: "*I* don't have a problem with X! I don't even believe you have a problem. Where is your proof? It's totally not a problem with Linux, if it's even a real problem at all."
Me: "Umm...okay. Well...all I want to do is be able to X (where X was get on the internet, hear sound, use a wireless network card, have decent battery life - all of which were or are problems). Here's more information....
Linux Community: "You are using Y? Y is worthless. Everyone knows Y isn't supported in Linux because of XYZ. You either need to write your own driver or get a real Y."
Me: "Can you tell me, specifically, what Y I should buy?"
Linux Community: "*I* have ABC and it works great. But it's more than just what is on the box, it's the chipset and stuff. It's kind of hit or miss.'
Me: 'Wtf? This sucks....I'm going to run Windows'
Linux Community: 'N0ob.'
*six months later*
Linux Community: "Great news! We've totally made it so you can do X"
Me: 'Wait, last time you told me you could do X, and that it was easy, and free, and better than Windows. When I said I had problem doing X, you all told me I was crazy and to RTFM!'
Linux Community: 'Oh well....yeah...in the past, we've had some problems with X. Some users couldn't do X at all, but now we've totally fixed it! Now Linux is is totally great. Easy to use, great hardware support, best Linux ever. Totally better than Windows!''
--------
You get the idea. Months after getting flamed for complaining about how my wireless network adapter doesn't work in Linux, the Linux community raves about how they've improved wireless support.
I've had plenty of problems with Windows....but when I have a problem with Windows, at the very least, people *believe me*.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linus not liking ACPI is no reason for other people to not write patches to make the kernel more efficient under battery power.
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I've had the same exact issue you detailed here with Windows, OSX, BSD, AIX, Solaris, and Linux.
Nothing works right 100% of the time - to quote three dead trolls in a baggie "It ain't the hardware guys, it just that every OS sucks".
Everyone knows that every app works on the developer's machine...
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, the fact that it works at all is the miracle here.
Something that bears repeating. The point is that there is no "Home" edition of any linux distribution. Linux is to consumer computing what Quadratec is to four-wheeling. Quadratec will sell you everything you need to build your own jeep from the rubber up—if you have the right skill set.
Re:Do you have non anecdotal evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like you are simplifying the situation alot. Yes thats how you do power management on tiny microcontrollers, but that has nothing to do with power management on a typical PC.
Video card have ways to stop clocks in certain areas of the chips, this is the main way power is saved, same with CPU's. These devices don't have I/O pins in the same way microcontrollers do, usually all the buses are tri-state and there is no need at all to 'set' something to input or output or high or low, you simply high impedance the whole bus connection.
What you are talking about has nothing to do with programming on modern computers, you can't just tell your video card what pins to set as output and input, you have to talk to it over a bus, and it runs its own firmware/bios that may have calls that make it disable clocks in certain parts of its chips and high empedance certain bus lines etc. Knowing what these commands are and how to talk to chip when the manufacturer doesn't release any details, just a windows binary driver is the whole problem in the first place.
Re:power saving tip: disable the optical drive (Score:3, Insightful)
I've found that it's typical among any group of operating system fans. I can remember asking "Is there some way for me to change the interface font size?" on an OS X forum, and getting the same sorts of responses: "Why would you want to do that? Apple chose the right font size for you." (assuming your tastes are the same as theirs, and your eyes aren't better than average, and your screen is the same size and type...) For the most part, I've found that OS X fans simply criticize anyone who asks a question that reveals a limitation or fault in OS X, while Linux fans either give some alternate and insufficient solution, or jump into technical explanations that don't necessarily make sense.*
* (actually, with Ubuntu, I've found that fans usually point to explanations written by others even if they don't apply/don't answer the question/aren't understood by those fans; there was one particularly amusing thread on Ubuntuforums where I was admonished for asking about a technical question about fixing a particular bug when there was a workaround in the report, until I pointed out that the workaround was flawed and that if the patronizing forumites had bothered to look at usernames, they would have realized that I wrote the workaround they accused me of ignoring.)
Re:Poor choice for screensaver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and despite that Linux has an ACPI implementation provided by Intel, and (as far as I know) fully compliant with the spec. The problem Linux has is that most OEM implementations /aren't/ compliant - they're implemented to run with Windows, and debugged with Windows, which means that any time Windows allows them to get away with a shortcut they'll take it, and when it bites Linux's ACPI implementation in the arse they can feel safe in the knowledge that users will blame the problems on Linux.
We've been dealing with this kind of crap through Linux's whole history - traditional BIOSes are notoriously buggy, APM implementations were buggy and had lots of OEM specific crap, and now ACPI implementations are just as bad. The only way that this will change is if Windows stops being the standard against which everything else is measured.
himi