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Comment by specktr | Hacker News Reader

I meant no disrespect, I'm/was curious to know about your experience with windows. Personally I use linux distros 95% of the time and notice a significant increase in battery life and decrease in ram/cpu utilization compared to when using windows on the same system. ~8Gb (or more) vs 2.4Gb for the ram and 80% cpu utilization vs 10-15%. I'm curious how much of that difference is the background processes installing candy crush etc. But good on you if your system meets your use case and what not.

edit: clarify utilization I've experienced is cpu

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I've been using windows for the past 15 years. First 6 as a normal user/gamer then as a developer with php then as .Net developer. I do use linux but only on servers/vms. I've had the occasional issues with windows, not gonna lie, it's far from perfect. But i've rarely seen CPU hogging when idle. One time i can recall is when the windows update service was doing something and for few hours i had 80+ % cpu usage then it updated and it stopped. And one time something was wrong with the search indexing service, rebuilding the search cache fixed that issue.

As for ram, i have no problem of windws/apps using all the ram i have available, that means they will hit the disk less often and be snappier, in most cases

That's interesting, most people (myself included) usually find poorer battery life on laptops, often substantially worse.

The reasoning boils down to power management, but using linux cuts an hour or two off my laptop's battery life.

Originally I had terrible battery performance like what you are describing. I have a dell xps 15 9560 with a 97Wh battery. With bumblebee installed with proprietary nvidia gpu drivers I can get all day battery life no problem (easily 10+ hours of active usage). The same cannot be said for when its booted into the windows partition. Yes this is because of the gpu settings but why would windows need to utilize it with everyday tasks like google docs or casually browsing the web? It took some work to get the battery under control but after I did some reading about drivers and bumblebee I didn't have any problems. Been on this install for a bit over a year now without any show stopping issues.

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