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    XPS 13 Battery Life on Windows vs Ubuntu

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by CuriousN, Nov 9, 2015.

  1. CuriousN

    CuriousN Notebook Evangelist

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    Is there any substantial difference in terms of battery life? My understanding is that Windows generally gives better battery life than Linux.
     
    CuriousN, Nov 9, 2015
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  2. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    In general, windows will have better battery life on laptops compared to Linux. Good power management requires properly written drivers to manage the advanced power states of your laptop's hardware.

    A laptop manufacturer will typically right drivers for the most common operating system, which is Windows. You'd be lucky if a laptop manufacturer, or anybody in the community, wrote drivers with similar power management capabilities.

    Because of this, a laptop typically gets between 10% to 30% lower battery life when running Linux compared to Windows.

    It's also worth noting that the lower battery life may not matter. If you get 9 hours in windows, but 7 hours in Linux, the difference may be irrelevant. 7 hours may be good enough for what you need, so the extra battery life won't matter


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    kent1146, Nov 9, 2015
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  3. CuriousN

    CuriousN Notebook Evangelist

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    Dell ships the XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Perhaps it has efficient drivers for Ubuntu because of this?
     
    CuriousN, Nov 10, 2015
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  4. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    Most reviews I've seen about the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (Ubuntu) puts battery life within the same ballpark as the XPS 13 running Windows.

    Estimates are around 10%-15% lower than the Windows version... but I'd pretty much consider that to be equivalent (especially since it's nearly impossible to absolutely replicate load for battery testing across two different OS'es). 10% is such a low amount, that it might as well be within a margin of error.
     
    kent1146, Nov 10, 2015
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  5. Tomatot

    Tomatot Notebook Guru

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    Sure drivers are better with Windows, but usally Linux distributions are much lighter (Ubuntu ain't the good example), so sometimes with good optimizations you can achieve an even better battery life on Linux (Debian, OpenSuse, etc.)
     
    Tomatot, Nov 24, 2015
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  6. Chris9446

    Chris9446 Notebook Consultant

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    Plus I feel like theres more options for controlling power usage on linux
     
    Chris9446, Nov 24, 2015
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