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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

What’s your battery life like compared to macOS?

I've get around 6 hours on asahi linux. MacOS battery is at least twice as good - not sure since I've never ran out of battery on MacOS. Sleeping works on macOS so I always have to remember to turn off the laptop on linux. Good for taking notes though, the CPU dips to 40 FPS on desktop sometimes and can't play videos.

Thanks for answering. This is totally without hardware graphics acceleration, right? As my understanding is that gpu drivers are still an experimental work in progress.

If so, it’s pretty cool that you still get 6 hours even with that handicap. I’m excited to see how it looks once the GPU works well.

Yes, no GPU acceleration. All on the CPU. Mainly on google docs though and other websites, nothing very intensive.

The battery life is more about power management logic. I'd expect we'll be a long, long time, before Apple's power management logic is implemented.

Sounds more like it would be lower priority than very difficult?

It's not a single, difficult feature.

It's a system wide tuning of voltage frequency plus idle times for all sorts of micro-controllers, plus who knows what else.

In its own way, it's extremely, extremely difficult.

Yes, I’m aware. I’m just putting it in the context of the rest of the project.

True true, fair enough.

I read elsewhere on HN the other day that a PSCI API extension patch is awaiting upstream review to be merged into the Linux kernel and that power management would work better with that merged. May be an usable Asahilinux on M* MacBooks are not that far off..

Damn, if that's the battery life I might as well get a Framework or System76 laptop built more specially for Linux.

I'd also like to know. We recently had an interesting thread about Linux power management and efficiency on laptops.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644165

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