Comment by saidnooneever
1 day ago
battery life is not only factor of the laptop. having moved from Linux (ran gentoo quite minimal...) to freeBSD default install makes my laptop last about twice or thrice as long.
the art of idle software and efficient energy consumption is not landed in windows and Linux takes too much work..
mac does it not too bad + having good batteries, but thats not to say a laptop with a lesser battery should be trashed by a bad OS.
mobile operating systems are usually much more tuned to being good with battery life. I suppose Linux and perhaps windows do not seem to have laptops as main target even for 'desktop' distros or versions.
> having moved from Linux ... to freeBSD default install makes my laptop last about twice or thrice as long.
I’ve literally never heard this from anyone before, and I have to admit, I’m curious enough to try it for myself.
The last time I tried FreeBSD was 2001.
i am not sure why btw but i read some articles on here about software not being idle on background properly a lot of times (fancy terminals etc.). for me tho 'it just happens' because im unsure how to measure it precisely..
maybe my linux had a big or wrong setup u know, but it was running very lean. Freebsd runs about as lean tho.
cannot be bothered ofc to go back and measure it is some hp-elitebook withh a ryzen and iGPU in there.
If i run things like Claude it sucks my battery. But if i just run my editors code all day myself its all gd..use firefox as browser on both. other then that its x,i3,hx,rg,fd,fzf. thats about all i use..(so u see i hate it when any laptop empties soon.... i hardly use anything of it). usually i dont even open x/i3.
I run openbsd on an old latitude and that tracks. I mostly have only application active at a time. The others are idling. I believe on Linux, especially with DE, there’s always some polling or scanning going on.