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Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life.

My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and light. I take it with me when I travel, and the battery will last through a whole trans-atlantic flight. I don't actually care about the visual design, but the 2016 MacBook Air's keyboard feels very comfortable to type on, and the battery life is awesome.

Unfortunately, when this MacBook Air dies, it will probably get replaced by a PC. I don't really want to shell an insane amount of money on a new Mac, especially in an era where you can't get one without a touchbar, and I won't get the convenience of a non-USB-C port.

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> What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life.

This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.

I have managed to achieve the same battery life, down minute differences in the single digit either side, between macOS and Linux on a MacBook Air (which is a simple all Intel machine).

I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default.

One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more.

I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.

Firefox on Mac's big battery life problem is apparently lack of integration with the system compositor. There's a fix in the works for this. Although I expect safari will still be better in this regard. Safari is pretty impressive.

There is definitely an opportunity for a distro directly aimed at laptops and/or providing the maximum battery life.

It's really surprising/annoying that this isn't setup correctly by default. Linux on laptops is nothing new.

> built-in Nvidia GPU

  GPUs could consume a lot of power.

Source: I used a Windows 10 laptop (not Thinkpad) with Nvidia GPU and it usually lasted less than two hours on battery. I work on another laptop, Thinkpad without Nvidia or AMD GPU, it lasts 6-8 hours on battery.

For a given CPU and battery capacity, Nvidia Optimus and AMD XConnect mean there's effectively no difference in battery life between a laptop with and without a dGPU, assuming you keep the dGPU disabled while you're using it. There are of course gaming and workstation laptops that run the dGPU at all times but you get what you expect with those.

Agree with both points, but tachyonbeam wrote:

  > built-in Nvidia GPU (which 
  > I use for machine learning)

And I used aforementioned (gaming) laptop with GPU mostly for Deep Learning

Regarding the Thinkpad: I know this may sound crazy, but consider using installing windows, and using Linux in a VM. You get all the OEM and MS drivers for the hardware that way.

As long as I don't have to do hardware development, the Windows Services for Linux works pretty well for me with regards to command-line tools. I've been un-installing cygwin on my systems recently.

WSL is what finally got me to move off of OSX and back into Windows. IMHO, I prefer a thin MSI laptop to a MBP and a Surface to a MacBook Air. I'm trading my work MBP in for a Win 10 laptop with proper ports and docking station.

Interesting on the battery lifetime. My ThinkPad Carbon X1 gen 6 can do 10-12 hrs in Ubuntu, though I had to switch the bios sleep mode to Linux. Maybe the lack of an Nvidia graphics card helps.

Could you go into more detail about this?

I haven't done much special customization on the ThinkPad, other than updating the BIOS in Windows (it's dual boot) and changing the BIOS sleep setting. The sleep setting disables "Modern sleep", where the computer stays awake when sleeping, which isn't so well supported in Linux.

Currently I have 11 hours remaining, on 78% battery charge with a fairly dim screen (I use a setting to prevent the battery charging fully to extend its lifetime). Powertop shows a draw of 4.1W. Strangely the computer seems to run hotter in Windows and the battery lifetime is a bit shorter.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04, running KDE. The laptop (Carbon X1 6th Gen) has a very nice keyboard, red trackpoint, 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB RAM, i7-8550U CPU and a 2560x1440 display. It also has USB-C plus a couple of USB-A and HDMI sockets.

Oh okay. Looks like yours is a bit newer than mine. I don't see that option in the BIOS.

MacBook Airs don't have Touch Bars.

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