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Comment by chrisjsmith | Hacker News Reader

Without wishing to trash their efforts, Linux power management is a mess. Nothing works out of the box and you have to play around with powertop to optimise your kernel configuration to get even reasonable battery life. Add to that, the ACPI implementation is buggy as anything.

This, at least in my case when testing on an Acer 4820T, manifests itself as Windows 7 lasting 6-7 hours on battery (!) with heavy Visual Studio 2010 usage, whereas Ubuntu IDLING lasts about 2.5 hours out of the box and 3.5 after tuning it to bits.

It's ok optimising Linux like this but the whole EXPERIENCE is still horrid.

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The problem is mainly with bugs (often intentional) in the ACPI implementations of hardware vendors. While they almost always provide hacky windows drivers, they almost never provide linux patches, or even enough info for correct blacklists.

That's a problem of a failure to code to what is, not to what one thinks it should be.

As I've said before when this comes up--Windows is, for better or for worse, the de facto standard. Alternative operating systems (and Linux is very, very alternative, in this sort of use scenario) that don't recognize and acknowledge the de facto standard's effective supplanting of the de jure standard are Doing It Wrong.

edit: Swapped my jures and factoes. Shouldn't post while writing code...

Did you mean "de facto" when you wrote "de jure", and vice versa? Windows is the de facto standard, and ACPI is the de jure standard; you wrote the opposite.

Er, yes. My bad, was writing a unit test at the same time. ;)

No the problem is that ACPI is a poor piece of design to abstract what is effectively a stinking great turd of an architecture.

You just simply don't get these problems on non-x86 systems. (I speak from experience with MIPS, ARM and SPARC btw).

On non-x86 you get different problems, such as the kernel needing special-case initialization code for every phone model ever made.

That's a fair point. The main problem with that is that most vendors want platform lock in so they implement their own verified loaders (if it's for a phone).

If we had OpenBoot on ARM, things would rock.

Is there a dedicated graphics processor or switchable graphics in this notebook? This might explain the rather big difference in battery time since many Linux graphics drivers are not power-optimized and switchable graphics does not work. [1]

Anecdotally, my rather old notebook (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro V3205) runs cooler, quiter and longer when using Linux compared to Windows Vista. I still get slightly more than 2 hours out of my battery (3000mAh left). Maybe this is less of a problem with older, well supported hardware.

[1] But people are working on it, see e.g. https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee

So, did you make any powertop suggestions permanent, or are you fiddling with it every time, depending on the situation?

Turned on everything it said would reduce consumption.

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