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Comment by jmole

7 days ago

It's ACPI - most laptops ship with half-broken ACPI tables, and provide support for tunables through windows drivers. It's convenient for laptop manufacturers, because Microsoft makes it very easy to update drivers via windows update, and small issues with sleep, performance, etc. can be mostly patched through a driver update.

Linux OTOH can only use the information it has from ACPI to accomplish things like CPU power states, etc. So you end up with issues like "the fans stop working after my laptop wakes from sleep" because of a broken ACPI implementation.

There are a couple of laptops with excellent battery life under linux though, and if you can find a lunar lake laptop with iGPU and IPS screen, you can idle around 3-4W and easily get 12+ hours of battery.

15 comments

jmole

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sidewndr46  7 days ago

Don't just leave us hanging, what model number laptops have that great of a battery life?

  • admash  7 days ago

    LG Gram laptops have excellent battery life. E.g. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lightweight-with-power-and-20-...

    I have an LG Gram 15 from 2021 and it gets 15+ hours under light usage in Linux.

    • kmac_  6 days ago

      LG Gram user here with Debian as a daily driver. Can confirm, maybe not 15h, but I don't think about charging. Plus, it's super stable, not a single crash or hang-up over years. It just works. I hope LG will keep this up and not mess up next iterations of the hardware.

    • kaladin-jasnah  6 days ago

      I had an LG gram before the battery in it gave out and now it won't boot with the battery plugged in. The battery life was amazing, it always slept properly, etc.

      Now I have a Framework. It randomly reboots when I close the lid, the battery life is terrible, etc. I live with it since I like the idea of a repairable laptop.

      1 reply →

  • kijiki  7 days ago

    Lunar Lake Lenovo Carbon X1. If you get the IPS screen, you'll get even better than 12 hours.

magicalhippo  7 days ago

What's standing in the way of doing something like NDISwrapper but for ACPI? Just that nobody with ghe required skills has spent the effort? Or something technical?

browningstreet  7 days ago

ACPI has been a problem for Linux for so long now…

  • jmole  7 days ago

    Its not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with laptop manufacturers not caring about designing their ACPI tables and firmware correctly.

    • barrkel  6 days ago

      If the observable behavior is bad Linux performance, it's a Linux problem.

      There's a saying in motorcycling: it's better to be alive than right. There's no upside in being correct if it leaves you worse off.

      There are ways to make things better leveraging the Linux way. Make more usable tools for fixing ACPI deficiencies with hotloadable patches, ways of validating or verifying the patches for safety, ways of sharing and downloading them, and building a community around it.

      Moaning that manufacturers only pay attention to where their profits come from is not a strategy at all.

      4 replies →