We have a laptops with even smaller batteries from major brands who claim 10+ hours battery life.
13 inch LG Gram used to have a microscopic battery, while they claimed 16 hours of life from it. They got into quagmire with press coverage, and nearly doubled the battery size in the next generation.
Half of battery life on a modern laptop is basically battery size/screen size, and you can't do anything about it except adding a bigger battery.
It's still possible to make a laptop with terrible battery life if you get a single "power hog" part.
For an Intel system, a CPU, and its VRM may take less than 1W in idle, but a bad WiFi card, DP-LVDS bridge, USB hub, Thunderbolt chip, SSD, or terrible power supply can easily blow the power budget above 6-9W in idle.
Even seemingly innocuous parts like SD card readers, keyboard/touchpad controllers, sensors, wacom chips, embedded controllers can be very bad at idle power consumption, to the extent they take more power than idling CPU.
JavaScript eats battery and Safari is the only of the three major macOS browsers that takes power use seriously. If you live in webapps and Electron you’re gonna have battery trouble no matter what.
That said, my linux laptops, where I use the same apps and where I have no safari, have far better battery life. So it is not only that.
There is Linux and there is Linux. Do you run KDE? It's basically the heaviest DE around, so it's bound to impact power-management.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...
GNOME has really progressed since the 18.04 LTS days, but I am still on the edge of going back to it (currently I use XFCE).
JavaScript everywhere since version 3 and adamant refusal to support shaded windows is what puts me off. If I wanted that I would be using ChromeOS.
Watching powertop, the biggest consumers for my battery after the screen are:
- the keyboard backlight (1W)
- bluetooth left on
- pulseaudio needing a restart (fuck pulseaudio's session management)
- iwlwifi power saving mode being misconfigured
- Skype
If any of these situations are happening then I only get 4 to 6 hours. Short bursts of CPU/GPU activity like desktop transitions don't last long enough to make a significant impact.
Other than Skype being poorly written, this stuff could all be automatically detected by a daemon or by the software itself.
I'd probably have bought two if they were out when I was looking last year. Wish them plenty of success, because there aren't many competitors out there with Linux as a first class OS.