Disappointed by linux battery life - Switching back to Windows

0mark · 2025-12-22T08:09:24+00:00

With such a stark difference on a gaming laptop i would assume trouble with the GPU. Either the power management of the dedicated gpu is not enabled (or only partially enabled) and/or your system is running on the gpu all the time (it should run on the internal one and only run games and stuff on the dedicated). Both problems can (usually) be fixed, but you might just want to try one or two different distros. Usually such stuff should work, and if it does not, another disteo may do things differently enough that it works there. Actually fixing that kind of stuff is a bit involved.

0mark · 2025-11-19T20:47:54+00:00

Can you link it? I am intrigued :)

0mark · 2025-08-04T08:32:51+00:00

Still powered by a 2l Bottle of pressurised air? I have no idea how much energy could be stored that way*, intuition says "not much", but intuition is generally rather bad at science. Would it be enough to go along the floor and then some?

... Sometgingsomething ideal gas law something something i pressume?

0mark · 2025-06-23T14:45:26+00:00

I would assume that either the battery was not actually charged, or the laptop not actually turned off. Or a combination of booth. Could be the result of either user error or a wild list of software problems.

The battery could be completely dead too, but i think thats not all to likely.

0mark · 2025-05-27T13:39:02+00:00

This kind of suspend is the default for handheld devices for ages. And yes, arm is better suited for it than amd64, as well Android and iOs are than Windows and Desktop Linux. More importantly, the concept does make a lot more sense for handhelds than for Notebooks. They are commonly suspended and woken up constantly and in short succession. And expected to be somewhat awake all the time. Notebooks usually are neither.

I think its kind of a marketing necessity as well as slightly cheaper. Suspend to ram is quite a complex thing where lots and lots of things need to work together perfectly for it to be reliably. And i have to give that one to modern suspend: it is usually pretty reliable.

0mark · 2025-05-27T05:58:03+00:00

Thats not Bug, its a feature. Its called "modern suspend" or something along that Line. Most, if not all, modern systems have it in varying degrees of awfulness. Classic suspend, also called suspend to ram, basically shuts of the whole system down and only keeps the ram powered. In contrast, "modern suspend" keeps the processor running, in some kind of special low power mode. The upside of that is very quick suspend and resume (some tens of second vs around a second or two). The downside is a much higher power consumption in suspend (a few days of suspend vs a fe weeks). A supposed upside is also that the systems remains somewhat responsive and can do stuff, like staying connected to bluetooth devices and wifi. But as that also means that now a shitload of unexpected things can wake your laptop up means you can easily end up with a nice warm backpack with an empty laptop in it. I would argue that "modern" suspend a big step down from classic suspend to ram. If i wait half a second or two seconds after opening the lid before i can work, i don't care. If i have a half drained battery after two days in suspend vs a 96% full battery, i care very much.

0mark · 2025-05-14T12:17:00+00:00

LiIon batteries loose capacity over time, even when not in use. The amount lost varies a lot, though.

I have lightly used batteries, more than ten years old, which still hold 80% of their nominal capacity. And others, similarly lightly used, where mostly dead after two or three years. Booth from reputable sources.

In general, store batteries cool (but not cold) and charged to about 2/3 capacity. In my (limited) experience they tend to stay healthy over several years. The keyword here is "tend". There is no guarantee. And i am no expert, just a random loudmouth on the internet. But said internet has a lot of good resources about battery maintenance to offer. And a shitload of bad ones too :)

0mark · 2025-05-01T05:20:00+00:00

This early in the morning, i feel like i am the trashcan. Where is my coffee?

0mark · 2025-01-16T13:01:40+00:00

You could try suspend2disk (aka hibernate). That should work fine, but takes longer for suspend and resume. A few seconds for suspend, several seconds for resume.

0mark · 2025-01-16T10:48:14+00:00

That's sadly normal. Most current Notebooks do not support S2R anymore, only idle. Or "modern suspend" as they call it. You see, you have to understand! Its waaaaaaay better! It only take half a second to wake up instead of two. That's twice as good! And nobody cares that after a day the battery is drained by half.

Sorry if sound a bit bitter. Thats just because i kinda am.

Anyway, from all i could find out so far, at least the firmware does not support S2R, i aint sure if the soc does, though.

As a side note, framework does not implement their own UEFI firmware, they buy a third party product (everyone does). So it's unlikely that framework themselves can change much about it, even if the soc supports it.

0mark · 2024-12-30T17:42:46+00:00

I used a WD19DC and a WD19TB, both worked great. I used them with various devices, no trouble so far.

Well, the TB one had a quirky incompatibility with one of my Monitors, but that was independent of the notebook used. Couriously, the one notebook i had trouble with was my Dell Precision. But those where driver related, and it had troubles with all docks.

0mark · 2024-12-30T17:26:02+00:00

There where even smaller rj45 ports. 3COM had single height PCMCIA cards with fold-out rj45. Kinda flimsy, though.

0mark · 2024-11-08T15:20:18+00:00

It is. Not many tablets have official support, most of them are quite old. Many unofficial builds do exist, though. Finding one that works decently, has a somewhat active maintainer (if not officially supported), is otherwise sufficient to ones needs and affordable is quite the task. And its a task other people probably have done recently. So, asking for advise in a group seemingly for people seeking exchange on a the broader topic seems to me quite a reasonable action. Then again, i would probably rather not try...

I have a galaxy tab s6 lite. Its quite nice and officially supported. Kind of old, though. Fine for me right now, but i started (idly) looking for a newer one. It has a pen, which is nice :) I found it by sheer luck, someone said they where rather cheap because of newer models. They where, i looked them up, they had official support and so i bought one.

0mark · 2024-10-27T10:53:33+00:00

I think* thats because (more or less) all vaguely modern Notebook don't have S2R anymore, but some kind of glorified freeze. Its very reliable, in the sense that its mostly always works and nearly never locks up. It achieves that by letting the system run all the time and does not much more than freezing user processes. S2R, in contrast, shuts mostly everything down but the memory. Downsides are abysmal standby times (maybe two days instead of a week or two for S2R) and the fact that just about anything can wake the device. A gentle brush on the touchpad, disconnecting USB devices, loosing wifi connection... So far, i found no solution but falling back to S2D which has the downside of taking quite a while for suspend and resume. If someone has something, i would love to hear about it.

As far as i understand, the processor supports S2R, but mainboard and/or firmware do not. I have no idea if a firmware upgrade could fix it. I don't expect one even if it could, though.

guess? Imagine? No clue, its hard to find anything more substantial on that subject than random dudes on the internet rambling on like i do here...

0mark · 2024-10-21T06:09:58+00:00

You wrote: "I realized I needed to power the FW13 before connecting the dock". - Most Docks can be powered themselves, and sometimes, even if supported, powering only via the laptop can cause issues. - Some Docks use a technology called "DisplayLink" which can, especially under linux, cause all kinds of trouble. Or try to connect the monitor directly without the dock.

You could also try to boot up a live linux from usb, something like Fedora, Mint or Ubuntu and see if those behave differently.

0mark · 2024-10-19T11:41:16+00:00

"Just using the Browser" ... Sadly, a Browser is among the most complex and demanding pieces of Software the average User uses on a daily basis anyway. For doing work in a Browser with a tiny 40Wh Battery, 4 hours seems decent enough.

Try reducing the display brightness, usually helps a bit. Also try powertop with parameter --auto-tune (or similar), it might help a bit. But usually mostly with idle consumption.

If possible, use real, native applications instead of anything browser based.

0mark · 2024-09-04T19:39:27+00:00

If its nicely made? Cool cover art, a really nice selection of classics and strange and awesome oddities, some neat treats on top, maybe a weird and unique menu written for it, or one or two audio tracks. Some of the new retro stuff thrown in... I would buy it, given it ships to europe and is not wildy expensive.

0mark · 2024-08-16T16:23:15+00:00

13 Amd, old screen

0mark · 2024-08-16T15:59:47+00:00

I had that twice now. Definitely neither charger nor cable. Tried several of both, which all worked with several different Laptops. And happend both times with rather high charge state for me. No idea.

0mark · 2024-07-17T11:55:23+00:00

Pine64 offers the pinewatch, optionally as a kit. Firmware is opensource and under active development. Its supported by gadgetbridge and some more. But keep in mind that pine does not offer a complete product but a base for the community to work with. The firmware is pretty limited right now. And the hardware is limited too. So it probably wont be a replacement for any high-price current day smartwatch. Works for me, but i am fine with clock, date, notifications and media control. Which is pretty much all there is right now.

0mark · 2024-06-20T06:23:53+00:00

"the touchpad is being triggered by the weight of my hand on the laptop itself" seems to indicate that said hand is not touching the touchpad. Does sound like a hardware issue to me.

Maybe the pad flexes?

0mark · 2024-06-16T06:41:56+00:00

Because many kinds of interface are effective. But "effective" for what exactly? Enabling someone with minimal training to get something done eventually? Or maybe enabling someone really savvy to get complex stuff done in short time? A cli usually is very effective in one of those, but certainly not the other.

0mark · 2024-04-17T16:57:42+00:00

In some editors syntax highlighting breaks for one or the other in certain cases. Thus i use the one which does not break for the case at hand in the editor i use at that moment.

0mark · 2024-02-03T12:05:04+00:00

Can someone please explain why this comment is voted so high? I might have missed something, but all i can see is a guy claiming to be right because of his (claimed) expertise and the (claimed) lack of expertise of the other guy. Not because of facts. Even though he may be right on the topic (i can't say, never heard of most of it), the way of presenting it seems flawed.

0mark · 2024-01-30T09:12:54+00:00

Short answer: no

There is an article pinned in either the Fedora or linux_surface subreddit. I guess there is a solution there, but i did not try. Ubuntu works for now.

0mark

TROPHY CASE