The Nasty Battery Power Usage On Ubuntu 11.10

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Nasty Battery Power Usage On Ubuntu 11.10

This morning I shared some initial battery power consumption results for Ubuntu 11.10 from three different mobile devices. For all three of them, the power consumption on Ubuntu 11.10 was even higher than Ubuntu 11.04, which was already in a power hungry state. Before calling it a week to go handle XDC2011 matters, I ran some tests from a standard Intel Atom N270 netbook. Sure enough, Ubuntu 11.10 is doing a heck of a job at burning through power...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTg5NA

[AnonymousCoward]

Idle, DPMS Off, Video Playback

Idle and Video Playback are mutually exclusive. The system cannot be idle and playing back video at the same time.

[mvniekerk]

For the past odd 1.5 years I've yet to read a thoroughly positive toned article on Ubuntu on Phoronix.

It is not just Ubuntu that is going to suck more power, it is Linux. The changes are on the kernel side.

Geezzzzz....

Compile in the new kernel on an Arch Linux / <your favourite distro here> and test the power again.

Ubuntu bad, Ubuntu slower booting, Ubuntu Unity fail, Ubuntu unstable, Ubuntu own test suite (where is ours!), Ubuntu <negative rant here>

I, for one, love Unity. And its keyboard shortcuts. KDE is a good second but the <meta>+1 to switch between apps is brilliant. I am really productive on it, and apart from the terrible power management I'm actually looking forward to 11.10.

[smitty3268]

For the past odd 1.5 years I've yet to read a thoroughly positive toned article on Ubuntu on Phoronix.

It is not just Ubuntu that is going to suck more power, it is Linux. The changes are on the kernel side.

Geezzzzz....

Compile in the new kernel on an Arch Linux / <your favourite distro here> and test the power again.

Ubuntu bad, Ubuntu slower booting, Ubuntu Unity fail, Ubuntu unstable, Ubuntu own test suite (where is ours!), Ubuntu <negative rant here>

I, for one, love Unity. And its keyboard shortcuts. KDE is a good second but the <meta>+1 to switch between apps is brilliant. I am really productive on it, and apart from the terrible power management I'm actually looking forward to 11.10.

Phoronix has long been bashed because it doesn't care about anything other than Ubuntu. It completely ignores other distros and only focuses on Ubuntu. I don't think it really has anything to do with whether the stories end up being positive or negative.

[Vadi]

I'm fairly certain Fedora has started to be getting more attention, as the distro has been improving to be more common-user friendly.

[josian_220]

I'm fairly certain Fedora has started to be getting more attention, as the distro has been improving to be more common-user friendly.

It might be getting more usable but the default gnome-shell theme is hideous :P unity looks really great IMO, 11.04 was not ready for me yet but the little while I've been testing 11.10 I was satisfied but since I'm going to college soon I'll have to wait until 11.10 hits stable release so that I switch to it from fedora.

[ioannis]

For the past odd 1.5 years I've yet to read a thoroughly positive toned article on Ubuntu on Phoronix.

It is not just Ubuntu that is going to suck more power, it is Linux. The changes are on the kernel side.

Geezzzzz....

Compile in the new kernel on an Arch Linux / <your favourite distro here> and test the power again.

Ubuntu bad, Ubuntu slower booting, Ubuntu Unity fail, Ubuntu unstable, Ubuntu own test suite (where is ours!), Ubuntu <negative rant here>

I, for one, love Unity. And its keyboard shortcuts. KDE is a good second but the <meta>+1 to switch between apps is brilliant. I am really productive on it, and apart from the terrible power management I'm actually looking forward to 11.10.

Of course it is distro related. Aside from kernel and power profile settings (which is again a distro decision), the way the user-land behaves (and choices of packages) has a major impact in energy consumptions as well.

[madjr]

of course Michael is going to post consumer issues about ubuntu. Isnt that the distro he uses?

also is the most widely used distro and many are based on it so they'll have the same problem.

Or maybe you want him to post issues with Slackware and get like 2 views? Who uses that?

[madjr]

oh and where is the bug report link so i can sub to i

[another_sam]

man, this is sad. with 11.04 the battery already evaporates in 2.5 hours even if you don't touch the laptop. with windows 7 I guess it can last for more than 5 hours.

the incredible thing is that kernel developers must be suffering this pain themselves, and they should rush to fix this, but, kernel versions and months pass, and the bug persists.