joluveba I have a laptop with Solus KDE, and sometimes I think I should move to Solus MATE, and save more battery.
Is Plasma's fractional scaling important to you? MATE offers 100% and 200%, like Budgie. Its auto detect setting (according to MATE tweaks) changes to 200% if it detects an HIDPI monitor. I thought I'd mention this, because some folks choose Plasma specifically for its fractional scaling ability.
tomscharbach I've been able to get mine to around 80%-85% of Windows battery life on Plasma. I'm on a Ryzen 3 3200 with integrated graphics, using TLP and Powertop. To be fair, battery life has been my goal and getting back to the 4~ hour mark that this machine had on Windows was always a target. I also haven't used Windows on this machine other than to install BIOS updates occasionally, so I'm not really sure what the sacrifices are I'm making in terms of performance on Linux and how it compares. I just know I'm over the 3 hour mark now, and the machine still does everything I want and need without a hiccup.
Edit
I'm not sacrificing WiFi or Bluetooth. It's always connected to the internet and I use KDE connect for my phone whenever I use the laptop, so there's that.
Amd has always been a better power user than Intel
Axios Amd has always been a better power user than Intel
I think that's true during the Ryzen era. However, there is a trade-off, as always.
AMD and Intel make different assumptions about consumer experience, and different design philosophies about battery performance/life. In a nutshell, AMD basically detects that the laptop is on battery, and dampens performance to maximize battery life across the board (including turning off boost), but Intel does not, using boost when needed, spiking up clock speeds and battery drain in short bursts.
It gets down to what is important to users, in the end. AMD's approach is better for users who want to extend battery life as much as possible. Intel's approach is better for users who favor increased performance at some cost to battery life. The reports I've seen don't suggest dramatic differences between the approaches, although all report that Ryzen battery life is better at some sacrifice of performance or perceived performance.
The relevant question is whether AMD's approach makes a difference when it comes to comparative battery life between Linux and Windows. Do Ryzen users get equivalent Linux/Windows battery life because AMD's approach, or not? I don't know.
Brucehankins I've been able to get mine to around 80%-85% of Windows battery life on Plasma.
I'm not sure how 3-hours (Plasma) compared to 4-hours (Windows) equates to 80-85%, but I'm consistently getting 70-75% across the board on two laptops. On the 11-3180 (Kubuntu) I get 3 +/- hours out of a 4-hour battery. On the 7390 (Solus Plasma) I get 6 +/- hours out of an 8-hour battery. Both are consistent with my earlier testing, and both meet my needs.
I installed TLP at one point in my testing, but did not see a material gain in battery life, perhaps because I was already "implementing" some TLP policies just by the way I use the laptop when on battery.
I've decided that I'm content with 70-75%. I've stopped looking for the Holy Grail of battery life.
tomscharbach it's right around 80-85% of the battery life I got out of Windows on the same machine. Again, this could be less now. That was on 10, I've since upgraded it to 11, but I only boot into Windows once every 3-6 months, and it's typically only doing some updates, not actually using the laptop.
I should have also noted, I'm running Wayland exclusively. There are some performance trade-offs with X11 and some small bugs still that don't happen on X11, but I'm okay with those trades as I think Wayland will eventually be the standard.
I've dreamed of having something that will get M1-M2 type performance and battery life, but I just don't want to spend that much money and choose to use Linux over other OS options.
I played around with settings using boost and it was interesting I have it set to ultra with boost turned on
seems doing best which is interesting. Below is discharge curve flat spots are where i just shut the lid of the laptop the other is when I am using it.
After looking at it dont think the discharge curve could be any better,sitting still no programs open dual core
cpu usage around 5-8% (Budgie) My battery is around 85.9% of new capacity how much charge its holding
2017 laptop
gnome-power-statistic (I dont Hibernate or suspend)
tomscharbach Solus TLP package comes with some power saving options disabled, see TLP settings in Solus. Not sure if it makes a big difference, but there are a few more options you can try.
palto42 So many variables for something like this In my case I didnt want to totally slow it down past a mid performance but for some odd reason it was worse than the high performance settings.
I think one just need to set up some general settings and test each one for awhile and see where he is at
(Boost was appimage prog to set computer but to answer I did not see much change it had that feature to
turn on-off)
