I used my M1 MacBook Air last weekend with Asahi and GNOME on train ride for roughly 4 hours (browsing the web, fiddling with a server over ssh, writing a blog post) and when shutting it down, it was still at 78%.
This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.
I've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.
I've get around 6 hours on asahi linux. MacOS battery is at least twice as good - not sure since I've never ran out of battery on MacOS. Sleeping works on macOS so I always have to remember to turn off the laptop on linux. Good for taking notes though, the CPU dips to 40 FPS on desktop sometimes and can't play videos.
I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS's power management probably has a big influence too. In the same way that Linux laptops usually have a bad battery life compared to the same hardware on Windows. How good is Asahi when running similar workloads? And is it possible that it could reach parity with "stock" MacOS?
(I'm sure linux is in theory just as power efficient as MacOS or Windows, but distros are just usually not very concerned or capable of tuning it well enough.)
Can anyone comment on how battery life compares when running Linux on M1/M2? (I haven't been a mac person in many many years but I do love the Air and would consider getting one now that I wouldn't have to use their os)
You’re comparing an OS with a specific device. In the union case (Asahi Linux on MacBook), the battery life is much higher than 3h. Not yet 13, but soon should be close.
The battery life (i.e. the backlight being either ON or OFF, without anything in between) is one of the biggest points that hinder moving to asahi for me.
Every time I open it up to try it out again, it's so bright that I try to reduce the brightness, which turns off the screen completely, which then has to be fixed by imagining what the screen state is and using hotkeys and typing out commands to get it back to full on blasting the sun out from the screen.
The selling point for this when usable IMO is having a laptop that will last 4x the (already insane) battery lifetime of macos, by having just a basic terminal and no default background processes that macos has.
Right, and that is the issue. If I buy a Mac and run MacOS I can be sure that I get long battery life. If I get a PC laptop and run Linux, it's a random crapshoot if the random combination of hardware, kernel version, etc. (I also used Silverblue and Fedora) of whether you get a good battery life.
Maybe Asahi Linux will improve things, since they only target a very small number of hardware configurations.
I'm seeing incredible battery life in firefox on my M1 macbook air. Although maybe I just don't have high expectations after my linux based lenovo before this.
Battery life of hackintoshes never was that impressive or was it? But if you want apples to oranges instead, then even in its very basic, hacky state linux on that macbook gets 8-10 hours:
How is the battery life on Asahi (eg 16in MBP)? I'm debating this versus the HP Elitebook 865[0], which has 64GB ram, top spec Ryzen, and a 72whr battery. They claim 22h battery life, and 13h of youtube playback.
With some powertop tweaks battery life can be as good as in OS X. I do in fact get a bit more juice from Arch than from OS X in my MBA.
My setup is a very minimal on Arch, so the comparison is slightly unfair but it shows my point. OS X doesn't do any special magic. Linux can achieve equally low power consumptions with decent drivers and correct setup.
I know the people working on Asahi Linux don’t have things perfect yet, but it runs on an M1 Air. That machine claims 18 hours of battery life (in some tests, MacOS) and gets 14.5-16.5 hours depending on who tests it.
The StarBook claims 10 and probably achieves less (everyone does).
The base specs are roughly comparable, except i3 vs M1 and the high resolution screen on the Mac.
The site is quoting me $883 vs $999.
Even ignoring the CPU difference, the battery life alone is probably worth the $100, let alone the display.
I understand the value some place on its openness, but it’s not even a medium sacrifice. It’s pretty big.
I have an M1 mac for work and I am seriously impressed with the battery life. I prefer my asus laptop that I loaded ubuntu on for my daily driver (gaming, coding, fun), but man, I can leave my work machine unplugged all day while running the work VPN, firefox & chrome, remote desktop, vscode, slack and mattermost, and finish out the day with above 70% battery. I wasn't planning to like this laptop but I do.
I have managed to achieve the same battery life, down minute differences in the single digit either side, between macOS and Linux on a MacBook Air (which is a simple all Intel machine).
I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default.
One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more.
I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.
This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.
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