New ThinkPad battery life on Ubuntu

I used this for my work issued thinkpad and it was awesome: https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html

Power management kinda doesn't work on Linux, outside of ACPI. There are very minimal rules once you disconnect from AC, and most of the time you'll switch into high-usage mode when it isn't needed. There's not a clean way to fix this, to my knowledge; the Linux scheduler stack is just kinda based around desktop and server hardware.

That being said, I also use Linux on my Thinkpad anyways. There are decent enough workarounds that I can keep my system up for 5-6 hours when away from AC:

- Switching into battery-saver mode will keep clock speeds down, which generally reduces power usage (as long as you aren't slamming the cores)

- tlp can help if your hardware has power-draining characteristics (I don't use it, my defaults are good enough)

- Using an auto-nicer can keep your system feeling responsive when in power saving mode: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler

So... caveat emptor, YMMV. Linux is far from the most efficient OS away from the wall, but with a little bit of configuration I feel like my system does indeed work as a "normal laptop".

What browser are you using? I'm on Windows, but I have to use Chrome for Google Meet and Drive because they perform so poorly in other browsers. I use Firefox for everything else.

You have to turn on video acceleration, install vaapi and make sure your browser is using it

You need to make sure your browser uses video acceleration.

For light usage my Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen 1 is about the same or a bit better than Windows (~6 hours usage) under Fedora with KDE, which has TLP-like optimizations baked in. It might not technically be as optimal for the hardware as Windows is but the system being much more "quiet" (Windows is always doing something in the background) likely makes up the difference.

I'm hoping that the next generation of AMD/Intel efficiency-focused laptop CPUs improve this dramatically though because it feels ridiculous that my M1 Max MBP gets better life not in power save mode while doing "real work" than I could ever get out of the Thinkpad with a light workload in power save mode. If this turns out to be true I'll be trading the Thinkpad in for a newer model.

The video + meet thing sounds like you're not using the GPU very well.

I’m skeptical that a 10-year-old MacBook is pulling 4-6 hours with the original battery.

Your experience sounds par for the course!

So long as power management is not a central core component managed by the kernel, this will continue to be a problem on Linux. MacOS is untouchable for battery life precisely for this reason; tons and tons of clever little hacks controlled by the OS that sum up to a seamless experience while maintaining optimal power usage.

15 years later, and Linux Power management still doesn't work on laptops, among many other things, that's why I switched to mac.

U can still run linux in the cloud, where it works well.

> Is this a known issue with Google Meet?

it's a mix of things.

from what i remember (when i used to use google meet for work):

- meet seems to work worse on firefox than on google chrome

- if you're doing any kind of video, you need to make sure hardware encoding is enabled and being used by firefox. otherwise all video stuff will be done on the cpu (slower and uses more power). look into the vaapi configuration and intel-gpu-tools

hardware-assisted encoding/decoding can do a lot of difference on cpu usage and battery life.

Is your machine using the best driver for the video hardware of the laptop? The right video driver will save tons of power.

Classic Linux driver issues. None of the power saving or advanced hardware features get used most of the time. I've had the same with Dell and Lenovo Linux machines - CPU never throttles down and is at full-chat 100% of the time. You'll probably also find out that one or more of the following will also not work properly: Bluetooth, sleep, wake from sleep, fingerprint readers, audio.

I'd recommend installing windows 11 if battery life is important (not trolling - windows just works with this sort of thing, Linux never does in my experience). Use WSL or docker to run Linux if you need it for development

Be it Google Meet or Zoom (though Meet is worse), on my Dell (with Ubuntu 20.04) I have to throttle the CPU so I don't burn myself. What's sad is here's no video or audio degradation when I do this.

Since you single out Google Meet, have you tried updating Firefox? There was a recent bugfix -- I think on the Google side -- that improved performance and unlocked a number of broken features for Firefox users.

https://www.howtogeek.com/google-meet-is-finally-being-fixed...

Good feedback perhaps it takes a bit of effort of laptop makers pushing Linux making these contributions to make it better for everyone.