Linux and Battery life

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Okay so I installed Manjaro over Arch base, I was having some issues with it and to be honest, I could not be arsed, anyways, Does battery life drain more in Linux over Windows 8? I got about 4-5 Hours on a fully charge using Windows 8, Will linux provide same or more life?

I want to upgrade my kernel to 3.13 or maybe 3.14, which ever is best for battery life.

Has anyone else had good battery life with Linux?

My specs are these.

ASUS X552EA - A4 version

A4 5000 512MB APU
4GB RAM
Samsung 840 Evo 120GB SSD

 

Thanks

2

I get about the same with Zorin OS, I get 2-3 hours on my laptop both on linux and windows

3

Also how can I adjust screen brightness its really annoying been at full power.

4

I'm not to sure for an arch based linux. You'll have to google that one.

5

By default, you get about the same battery life out of linux as out of windows.

If you optimize with powertop though, you'll get substantially better battery life out of linux.

Depends on your machine how to set the brightness. All Asus computers have their hotkeys correctly routed by default in linux because they're in the kernel. If the brightness keys don't work, that means that your ACPI or some other power management feature is not configured properly. Look it up on the Arch forum, they have all the things on this (as Arch always does!).

6

I'm sure you've found this already but it's really important  for laptops under linux, especially the link for powersaving

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/laptop

I wouldn't say you get the same battery life for linux and windows out of the box, but the general optimization tools like laptopmode will get you on par with windows, if you really know your hardware and customize what loads and what doesn't manually based on your needs you can exceed what windows will give you..

7

depending on the hardware you can get substantial battery-life gains with linux.

I find that OpenSuse has very good power-management out of the box, while Ubuntu usually is worse than windows. The community forks like kubuntu lubunty & xubuntu are ok but not brilliant.

tlp is an easy to use & very good power-manager (especially for Thinkpads).

Powertop is very powerful tool for finding power-hogs.

However keep in mind that if you use a DE that has allot of bling it's probably not going to be very good at letting your devices go to sleep. I recommend a lightweight DE like lxde, if long battery-life is the goal.

Also if the hardware vendor spend allot of effort to optimize power-management for windows, you might not get allot further on linux.

it's difficult to make prediction about how well a kernel performs on a particular hardware, why not try it out, run a few benchmarks and report back to us. I certainly would like to know, since not many people bench AMD APUs on Linux.

I have a thinkpad e145 with an Amd E1-2500 kabini APU  which runs really well on 3.12 and 3.13