he's making sure the battery life is enough, not buying it specifically for the battery life. It having the lowest battery life of the 4 tested doesn't matter as long as it meets his minimum requirement, considering none of the other laptops are taking framework's approach to design either.
I would not consider that an easily swappable battery, and while I might get a spare battery, I wouldn't casually change the battery since it requires opening the laptop up and unscrewing it.
Yeah - I'm a big framework fan but the battery is not easily swappable (if you define easily swappable as being able to do it without tools on the go between meetings). To me easily swappable is like that dell or the lenovos which had two batteries and the second one was hot-swappable.
While I still feel that swapping the Framework battery is easy, I completely agree with your comment and the preceding comment that it isn't "hot swappable" in any sense (nor swappable without opening the innards). My apologies for implying otherwise.
Yeah that toggle in newer distros is managed by power-profiles-daemon which ships with modern versions of Gnome. From what I've read you're better off only running one of these power management apps as they can conflict with eachother.
Sounds like you're getting totally fine battery life though so I wouldn't stress about it!
I'm about to give Fedora a whirl. Hoping I can get close to your numbers.
I'd recommend making sure you have thermald (2.3+, current version is 2.5) installed. It's the best way to load/use the proper adaptive DPTF tables from the BIOS.
Also, it's important to make sure you're running the latest kernel. Basically every release since 5.15 (up to 5.19 now) has had pretty important perf/power fixes for Alder Lake.
I don't know if it's my spec, or if it's because I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.1, but my i5-1260p model with 32GB of RAM is only getting about 3-4.5 depending on if I'm in video calls or just web browser/VS Code.
I eked maybe an extra half hour out by disabling the built-in power-profiles-daemon in favour of autocpufreq, but from the forum posts I've read if you need 6-7 hours reliably you may have to run Windows :(
I managed to have the same battery life if not better than on Windows 11.
I own a 3 years old Dell XPS 13, i7 16GB of RAM and run it on the latest Fedora (arch btw before).
It is a personal laptop, I mainly use it to browse the web and occasionally work on personal projects (Python,Typescript,Rust), mostly on neovim, vscode otherwise.
For power management, I use TLP instead and also disabled power-profiles-daemon (I don´t know autocpufreq).
The key point especially for my usage was to enable as much as possible video hardware acceleration for every app especially the browser (firefox for me).
Archwiki is your friend for that.
Also for intel graphics you should make sure that the graphics micro controller is used (Guc) for media decoding. It is also well explained on the intel graphics Archwiki page (guc/huc firemare loading).
I did a lot of testing on battery life testing on my new 1260P Framework recently. It has a 55Wh battery, so you can back out any of the calculations for battery life:
* On my Arch install (5.19 kernels, tlp and thermald installed, but default settings, running Sway WM), it idles at around 4W at 200 nits (if nothing is plugged into the USB ports and it's able to spend almost all its time in C10), otherwise you're looking at idles of around 6W. Overall, it should get about 10h doing "nothing."
* Light usage, including playing (VA-API hw accelerated) videos like YouTube will get to 8-12W.
I haven't done a lot of rundown tests, but I suspect for average usage (web browsing, basic productivity, light dev, but not monster compiles) you'd probably expect like 5-7h, but it's not going to give you 8h+ like you would expect with the best modern thin and lights.
A few other battery related notes:
* From Intel 11th-gen on, S3 suspend is no longer supported, just S0ix or s2idle ("modern standby") - I wrote a test script and for me, this uses about 0.7Wh when suspended, or about 1.3% of battery/hour - Windows machines automatically hibernate at 5% battery usage, and you'll probably want to setup suspend-then-hibernate for any newer Intel machine.
* The Framework 11th gen had some RTC/power off battery drain issues, but those are supposed to be fixed for 12th gen (I haven't tested as rundown times are in the weeks if its a problem).
If you're looking for maximum battery life for a Linux laptop btw, Tuxedo and Slimbook (shared TongFang chassis) recently released two recent models that would do better than the Framework. An AMD 5700U 15" model w/ a 91Wh battery which is a lot more power efficient (and can be made more efficient with RyzenAdj) - I used the last version of this laptop (and wrote a review on that as well) the past two years and can attest that it's good, and the improvements on the refresh fix just about everything I didn't like about the first version, but the 5700U is sadly using older Zen2 cores that are outclassed at high-end performance, and suffers from retbleed mitigations as well. The second model are 14" Intel 12700H systems with 99Wh batteries (at the same weight as the Framework, very impressive). While a higher power consumption chip, you can tame it with thermald, auto-cpufreq, or manual RAPL settings and make it perform pretty close to a P chip I suspect, and you have almost twice the battery capacity to play with. (Obviously, get the version w/o an Nvidia dGPU if you care about battery life.)
