WattOS: Is It Faster & Can Save Power Over Ubuntu?

[itheon]

Or should I just stick with Windows 7?

For me best is OpenSuse 11.4 ( Laptop 17" AMD P320, radeon 4570) with couple min. advantage over windows 7.
I tested Suse, and couple distros based on debian and ubuntu. If I remember right also Chakra and Fedora, but beside suse every time i get around 50% of battery life

Mint Debian Edition work just fine for me on my old laptop (Turion II x2) but with new one I get only half battery life even with older kernel ( 2.6.37 just like in Suse 11.4) forcing ASPM don't change anything ( no big suprise there because Windows is also reporting not using ASPM)

Try OpenSuse 11.4 ( 12.1 beta is coming this weekend but with new kernel ....) if it won't work you probably shouldn't waste time searching and just stick with Windows for few months.

[BlackStar]

I'm planning on getting a new AMD E-450 netbook soon. I'd love to run linux on it, but I'd hate to lose 20-30% of my battery life just by installing Linux.

What distro is the best for battery life? Or should I just stick with Windows 7?

If you value stability, suspend/hibernation and HD videos (flash or otherwise), then stick with windows. Otherwise the E-450 works fine with linux.

[Shining Arcanine]

WattOS should be aimed to productivity workstation under normal usage.
How can OpenArena, H.264 video encoding, gfx rendering, OpenSSL, Apache and password cracking fit this profile?
Your ideas about productivity are at least questionable.
Instead, boot the system, make some word processing, datasheet stuff, a little bit of browsing and leave the machine idle 10 to 15 minutes every 1 or two house.
This sounds more likely to be a "productivity workstation usage".
It's really hard to save power and compete for computing intensive tasks!

It lets you measure its ability to race to idle. Michael should have been more clear about that.

They're going to shoot me for saying this, but I'll say it... Debian Stable beats the snot out of Ubuntu in battery life, it's noticeably better..
Though of course you can also tweak your Ubuntu install to get battery life, as discussed in previous articles.

Were these tweaks Ubuntu-specific regressions from Debian or things that affected all Linux distributions?

[DanL]

They're going to shoot me for saying this, but I'll say it... Debian Stable beats the snot out of Ubuntu in battery life, it's noticeably better...

Are you comparing Squeeze to 10.04/Lucid (since both use 2.6.32 kernel)? Otherwise, it's an unfair comparison..

[Sidicas]

Are you comparing Squeeze to 10.04/Lucid (since both use 2.6.32 kernel)? Otherwise, it's an unfair comparison..

My point was more along the lines of... I've got a netbook that was running 10.04, but upgraded to 11.04 (and now 11.10)... It's not like there is any red flag up when you upgrade that says you're going to lose battery life if you do this... And I think most people don't expect to lose features like power efficiency when they upgrade their software.. Now that it's 11.10, there's really no way to downgrade it back to 10.04 without wiping the whole thing... In fact, I upgraded to 11.04 since it's beta, long before people really knew about the source of these power issues (most people blamed Unity)..


Meanwhile, my laptop running Debian stable is getting it's software updates and it hasn't lost any power efficiency yet..

IMO, I think it is a fair comparison.. The Ubuntu team approved of the newer kernels for distribution in their OS and it's costing people their power efficiency.. The Debian team haven't approved of the newer kernels for their stable OS yet and so Debian stable users can go about their business and maybe never even run into these power efficiency issues..

IMO, I think it's a given that every user should be running the latest stable version of their OS.. So yes, I think a Debian Squeeze vs. 11.04 is a very fair comparison.

Are you expecting people go to Ubuntu's website and see the great big download link for 11.04, but then stop and think..... "Oh wait, I don't want the latest stable version, I want an older stable version"?

The majority of Ubuntu users are going to be using 11.04 and 11.10 because that's Ubuntu's flagship product... Just as Squeeze is for Debian.

If you want to compare Squeeze to 10.04, then get Ubuntu to replace their links for 11.04 with 10.04 as the software that they're pushing as the best thing since sliced bread and I'll agree with that comparison.

Otherwise, I'll see it for the facts that it is.. Ubuntu is shipping software with less and less power efficiency and pushing it out as their flagship product. Not that I really care as Ubuntu and Debian meet different needs..

Those people who are so concerned about regressions like that, should be running Debian in my opinion.. There's no reason to stress yourself over stuff like that when there are alternatives.

[FunkyRider]

- What OS are you running?
- I'm running Watt OS.
- Yeah, what OS?
- Watt OS.
- Yeah am asking YOU what OS is it?
- It's Watt OS!
- Have you got bad hearing or something? W-H-A-T O-S are you using???
- @#@#@#$! I'm using W-A-T-T O-S!!!!!
- !@$%#$^$

[locovaca]

My point was more along the lines of... I've got a netbook that was running 10.04, but upgraded to 11.04 (and now 11.10)... It's not like there is any red flag up when you upgrade that says you're going to lose battery life if you do this...

Actually, if you read the release notes, it says that very thing:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyNarwhal/ReleaseNotes

Linux kernel: 10-30% increase in power consumption. (760131)

You do read the release notes before installation, right?