Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

The writer is a journalist. For techies using Mac, there's a bigger question of whether you want to just move from Mac to GNU/Linux.

View on HN

Whenever I try to use Linux I find it's essentially impossible due to terrible power management support for any hardware I can find. I'm used to 10 hours on my MacBook - how do I get that on Linux?

In my experience, you don't.

4-5 hours on T480s, I have TLP installed and I tried tinkering with it, but that's the best I've managed. People claim more, but I think it's just wishful thinking.

I get at least 8 hours with Debian/Openbox on a Samsung Notebook 9 Pro 13.3" - NP940X3N

Their are a variety of ways to manage all of the power management settings on Linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management

It can be a pain; enabeling sleep for every USB devices will likely result in the keyboard or touchpad becoming broken, increase the latency it takes to respond, etc. But once it's configured it just works very well. I'm getting 10+ hours on a Dell XPS 13" under light web browsing + youtube.

Any Apple laptop will likely need some unique customizations for everything to work and for maximum battery life. It could be argued that instead its popularity drives up the number of discovered errata. Case in point, the Archlinux page contains not only an extensive "Mac" page but it also has dozens of pages for specific Apple computers documenting pretty much everything you would need to know to get every feature working and get comparable battery life (could be a little better or worse).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro#Power_manage...

In case anyone reading doesn't know, the Arch Linux distro's wiki is great, and you don't need to use Arch to benefit from the wiki.

(The Arch wiki might be my single most useful source of technical info when tweaking things on Debian lately. I haven't tweaked laptop power management lately, but I used to do it aggressively, including building my own kernel, making sure CPU power management was working, tracking down every process that used CPU cycles or spun up the disk for no reason, turning off devices I didn't need, dimming CCFL backlight, etc.)

As a counterpoint, my XP’s 13 gets fairly mediocre battery life (4-6 hours?) because I never figured out how to configure the power settings. It also doesn’t fully wake up sometimes, but that’s pretty rare now - Ubuntu 19 seems to have fixed that. It’s my desktop that fails to wake sometimes now, even with suspend turned off (also Ubuntu 19. The memory leaks/performance slowdowns are improved too, but not gone - is, the laptop slow down after being on for a couple of hours. I think it’s from failing to fully wake from suspend or hibernate?

That said, it’s a great OS. I just wish it was less buggy. Not planning to switch in the near future

I ran Fedora on my Dell XPS 15 f/t for about 6 months, and found battery life to be similar to that on Windows. I think I remember reading on Phoronix that Fedora's power management defaults are better for battery life than most distros.

Personally I'd never move my primary workhorse from a Mac to GNU/Linux. I did the reverse switch years ago, and despite checking out all the weird and wonderful new releases and distros that have made it out the door, there's always some show-stopping time wasting quirk which reminds me why I switched in the first place.

Though I'm still a huge proponent for using GNU/Linux where it shines the best: i.e. server environments.

Probably far more likely in my case would be to follow the articles suggestion and just switch to windows... perhaps even using WSL.

Yep, my current combo Mac + Linux; i'm super happy with them:

- macbook air with OS X for holidays or house related

- macbook pro with OS X for work

- desktop with Ubuntu for long programming sessions

- home-office headless server with Ubuntu for NAS/webapp hosting/home-automation/backups

I have setup my systems to synchronise all my files through my NAS using unison. So all my project files are accessible locally on all my personal computers. I've been using this setup for at least 6 years now.

Unison is fantastic, it’s a shame it doesn’t appear to be actively developed anymore. Although in saying that... I don’t have any issues with it.

The writer uses bash, so I wouldn't be that quick to label them.

I have a friend who moved from a 2016 MBP to a Dell XPS with Ubuntu and has liked it a lot. Personally that's the only jump I would make from my current MBP as a development computer because even though WSL2 has come a long way, I still like having a psuedo*nix system to program on.

I'm not being an advocate here (I don't like, but do use, Windows), but WSL2 is actual Linux running in a lightweight VM. It's not even a VM running on Windows, but sits alongside Windows on the hypervisor (as far as I understand).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com