I read on a few reviews that the Framework Laptop has decent performance, but runs quite hot and has poor battery life. I’m curious if this is still true on Linux. Does anyone know what the factors might be in determining that difference? And is it possible to somehow get better battery life on Linux than Windows?
this may help:
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Of note, you can probably set PL1 and PL2 in ThrottleStop in windows
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@Ryan_Martens It might not be true on Linux according to the following review.
Linux
…
Framework’s battery life relative to competing laptops was far better under Ubuntu than in Windows
Image source: Ars Technica https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Framework-laptop.010.png
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Great link, and good to know the battery isn’t terrible on Ubuntu — in fact it’s surprisingly good. Thank you also @Jason_Hottelet and @cowpod 
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Anecdotally, on Fedora 34 (the KDE spin), I am getting around 4:45 minutes at 15% brightness while watching Netflix (I use this as a proxy for moderate work) on Firefox Wayland. Of note, I have the WD SN850 and the vpro wifi 6 card, both of which I believe are known to cause higher idle power usage. I’d be curious what other’s experience is, and if anyone has suggestions for stretching out the battery.
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@Michael_Lingelbach look into tlp. I used it with my xps and got significant battery gains. it would also probably be a good idea to look at your idle power draw with smth like powertop.
@Oskars_Cizevskis I have TLP installed now for the last few days, I’d estimate depending on the workload I get around 6 hours, but I don’t think battery life while browsing improved that much. My idle power draw is about 9W with powertop, dropping to 5 if I’m just in a terminal window.
I don’t see any interpretable breakdown based on wattage from power in powertop, I see 100% usage by SSD, wifi card, etc. Happy to share stats if pointed to how!
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@Michael_Lingelbach are you sure you’re on a recent version of powertop? The first column in Overview should show the estimated power draw of things like screen backlight, wifi, processes etc. See this link:
https://fedoramagazine.org/saving-laptop-power-with-powertop/
From there, you should be able to determine if something is drawing more power than what would be normal, i.e. a network interface consuming 5W when idle. If you find anything unusual, please post your findings here for others to look at!
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Yep,
❯ powertop --version
PowerTOP version 2.14
@Oskars_Cizevskis I had to run powertop for about an hour to for the wattage to show up. Here they are:
https://paste.sr.ht/~mjlbach/92288295cf1c03de7d0119ad5afbb92175eac79e
15W seems high. For context my friend got about 8W while watching youtube on his xps 13 at 50% brightness. This is also in line with what I remember from my ideapad laptop when I had one. Stating the obvious here, but a lot of power seems to be drawn by the wifi card at avout 1W, though I don’t know if that is abnormal or not, and the cpu for some reason. @Michael_Lingelbach Is this just when idling/browsing the internet?
Yes, this is just browsing with firefox with discord/slack running in the background (normal workflow). The power usage is closer to 10W for me, here’s a more representative reading.
https://paste.sr.ht/~mjlbach/9614a339cf94b92782fbd5d685ba3b73dd8edd24
This is with tuned, I’ve had similar results with TLP. I think 9-10 W is what you can expect.
That cpu power draw still perplexes me a little bit, but 10W while browsing the internet with a bright backlight doesn’t seem that unrealistic, I guess.
I am not too experienced with playing with power profiles, but if you are still unsatisfied with the battery life and want to go down that rabbit hole I am sure you can find ways to tune the performance with something like tlp or tuned-adm.
The backlight was pretty low (around 20%), and this is with the power saver option in the bios and after playing around with tuned/TLP for a day or so 
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This utility is a bit new to me, this screenshot of the powertop output for my machine (Linux Mint 20.2, upgraded to 5.11 kernel, installed tlp without any additional tuning) seems to show a fully idle power draw of the mid-3s watts - is that a somewhat normal number? Seems reasonable that the display backlight is the dominant component, not sure if the draw from bluetooth is expected (no bluetooth devices connected)
Seems reasonable to me. That’s over 15h idle
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FWIW I was able to reproduce a mid 3’s idle after removing one of my SODIMM’s (bring me down to 16 gb of ram, but the majority of the time the idle was closer to 4. On average it seems like this saves about 300-500 mW usage at idle. Going to see if this generally improves runtime.
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Any update on this? I’m hoping to eek out 9-10 hrs on a laptop doing browsing with 15-20% brightness. How is it looking for you?
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