So I accepted the 4-5h battery life, and was hoping for future improvements for out of the box fedora battery life.
Since I saw this this distro comparision on YouTube I am wondering why Ubuntu delivers so much better battery life out of the box? (4h YouTube: Ubuntu 47% vs Fedora 87% battery usage)
So Ubuntu delivers almost double the battery life.
Can anyone explain why Ubuntu has so much better battery life compared to Fedora?
Elevated Systems usually does some pretty good reviews…except he fails here. I would want to know what I am missing. In this case my guess is he fails in the same way Phoronix fails in its testing, you can’t compare apples to oranges and claim to have an answer. Ubuntu comes out of the box with more non FOSS elements than Fedora and makes it easier to add even more at install so I could not tell you if these systems are running with even vaguely the same graphics, firmware, and codecs packages all of which would contribute to this. Ubuntu is likely shipping Firefox as a Snap with HW Acceleration enabled if you want the added issues that Snaps may bring to your system go for it. Fedora leaves Firefox alone for you to configure as you please. This last item is likely the primary issue.
You should get roughly the same battery life out of any linux distro once they are properly configured with the general trend that a newer kernel will provide you with better power savings. If you are using Silverblue it adds additional issues because it is ery easy to not properly apply specific items to the image, or passing through assorted rpmfusion based packages which would fill out the codecs, ffmpeg, intel-media-driver, with either non FOSS (i.e. more complete codecs), or the absolute latest and complete intel drivers. I would recommend lookinng at this thread Custom Fedora OCI images for Framework laptops and possibly using one of those images as the base for your system. Since you are on SIlverblue it is as easy as rebasing.
I am on an intel 12th gen board and I use TLP getting up to 11hours on battery. Straight video 7hours, mixed use averages 8.5hours or more. I am on Fedora 39 Workstation, and I completely disagree with Elevated Systems findings. I have not (in the last decade) and will not recommend Ubuntu for the foreseeable future for any user. In the past 6 months I have encountered updates on production systems that failed to reach a graphical target on four separate occasions on two different machines. I have not had this issue on Fedora since I started using it as my daily driver in 2016. YMMV, but if you want a real comparison run Fedora Workstation with rpmfusion repos enabled, ensure all codecs are added, ensure your firefox has hardware acceleration enabled, and then compare.
Note: Also I would try TLP just to test and turn turbo off on battery. Turbo I have found is the single biggest contributor to chewing through your battery for waht amounts to little return. Also since you are on Silverblue verify your changes are actually passing through to the OS.
To be clear though, you don’t need Snap Firefox to get HW acceleration. I know the Firefox package on Mint works. But as you say, he may need non-FOSS drivers for the most complete codec support.
@stefanho
In Firefox, enter about:support into the address bar to see which hardware decoding codecs are currently working. In the Media section.
It seems only hardware decoding for AV1 and VP9 is supported out of the box.
I tried to set up YouTube to always use AV1 and it seems not to improve battery life, so this should not be the issue here.
Thats what I was expecting, to see roughly the same battery life out of the box with any linux distro.
But getting only half of the battery life, seems more like a bug.
Since I won’t spend hours tweaking settings to get the best battery life, I guess my initial question was a bit misleading.
I am more interested in if this is a general problem of Fedora and it will stay this way. Or if this is something I can expect to change over the next releases and get closer to the Ubuntu numbers.
Fedora will never ship everything Ubuntu does out of the box, so yes this will continue being a problem for you if you don’t want to spend the actual fifteen minutes that it does take to configure, not hours.
Is there one, definitive source that contains all the tweaks for better battery performance? I for one am struggling to find all the ‘tribal’ knowledge that appears to be really useful knowledge in the forums.
Thanks, it seems this improved battery life quite a bit. Any chance this change will find its way into the official Fedora releases?
When this is a Framework official suggestion, will it find its way into the Optimizing Fedora Battery Life Guide?
If so with Fedora Silverblue i got it working with the following command:
It’s been mergedinto upstream power-profiles-daemon, but the maintainer hasn’t made a new release. Once a new release is created it might be able to find it’s way into Fedora.
Yes, our knowledge base has this. For Ubuntu and Fedora. Some of the recommendations may feel extreme, however, they are of course, optional. And when I have the cycles, we’re revisit it again.
I must say that the actual worktime I get out of my 12gen is pretty good. The question how I setup my fedora system is also revealing the problem: I don’t remember. Which means I’m hesitant to upgrade to a newer version (im still on Fedora 36) because I don’t want to do the whole power settings research project again to get where I am now.
I’m currently seeing about a 1% drop in battery every hour or so when my FW13 is suspended and in aeroplane mode. It’s a standard installation of Fedora 39 using the power saver profile. Is this usual?
Yes normal. Ig you’re wanting multi day suspend behaviour I suggest setting up suspend2hibernate behaviour. Step one is setting up a subvol or hibernate partition (if you used fedora btrfs defaults). And then setting a trigger of after X mins or % remaining on s2suspend - hibernate.
The new release of ppd have been made and so a regular upgrade is all what needed now (besides RPM fusion codecs).
Wonder if the battery life is as good as Ubuntu after applying this change
For me it doesn’t make any sense that a considerably older kernel provides such a better battery life on such a recent platform.
It would be nice if someone re-run a battery drain test with the same OSes used in that yt video, under the same conditions (brightness, BT on/off, etc).
Folks tend to look at kernel and kernel age as a blanket across distros. This is not always the case. The OEM kernel I am always harping on about, the PPD from the PPA, these all match up in terms of functionality to what we see in Fedora (usually right after the first set of updates). Fedora is lightning fast at keeping things current.
Overall, Fedora will see updates faster. And it’s a pretty seamless experience. But if folks follow our Ubuntu LTS guide, it’s pretty close to a match in terms of compatibility (sans kernel versions).
Once Ubuntu 24.04, the latest linux-firmware, PPD, etc, will be present and it will be better matched overall. Whereas with 22.04.4, we do much of this through the guide.
I’m running on Arch Linux, the power consumption is about 4W when idling. When watching youtube videos in 1080P60, the power is about 17W without hardware acceleration and 11W with hardware acceleration, is that expected? I also find that the GPU load is about 30% which is a little bit high.
