[VariousPrograms]

As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world.

Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't be left in standby for too long or it drains to zero.

Meanwhile, it's been 10+ years since I've worried about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices, even my 3-5 year old ones. I can fall asleep with Youtube playing and it's still playing when I wake up. I'm certainly not here to dunk on Linux phones. I want one! But if someone willing to put forth above average effort to use these devices can't realistically daily drive them, who can?

[maheart]

>Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use?

What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.

[ttkari]

I have a Sony Xperia 10 III with SailfishOS and it easily does 48 hours on a charge when I'm not doing a lot of screen time. Also on days when I use it for tracking / navigation on 6-8 hour bicycle rides it easily lasts for the entire day and then some. I think this is not bad for a device that has been in daily use for almost three years and still has the original battery.

I'm running a couple of messenger clients and a web browser (Fennec under Android App Support as the native one is sadly a bit behind the times currently) all the time. The only thing I've noticed to eat a ton of battery is having wifi enabled when outside the range of my own networks, it seems the scanning the phone does in the background to look for known wifi networks is not energy efficient at all.

[nextos]

SailfishOS is quite efficient. On Sony devices, I experienced maybe 15% extra battery life compared to stock Android, which is quite good given that Sony ROMs are excellent. Sony is known for their Sony Open Devices Program.

[bobthecowboy]

I've been considering this as my Android exit plan (as part of a slow rolling de-googling effort, even before the recent "sideloading" news). Are you using it as a daily driver? I'm sort of surprised it doesn't get brought up more.

[shaky-carrousel]

Why isn't there more information about Furi FLX1 in the internet? Looks like a nice phone.

[numpad0]

N hours of actual use, in isolation, is just the matter of calculating average power draw[W] by runtime[hr] and buying the battery with Wh figures comfortably bigger than that.

e.g. your device consumed 1 Watt on average, you wanted 8 hour runtime, then you need a battery with 8 Watt-hours, or 2,162.162162162162 mAh at 3.7V of capacity, before factoring in buffers of various kinds. But it's also roughly the datasheet nominal capacity of a single 18650 cell.

You don't worry about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices and you can fall asleep with YouTube playing and it's still playing when you wake up because manufacturers know consumers do that and optimize the phone to make that work. They probably reduce display brightness, cut powers to mics and P cores, ask 3M to make the pouch films 1% thinner so battery could be few more percent bigger inside, fudge battery gauges so you would be nudged correctly to have enough charge before you fall asleep, the list goes as far as your imagination could possibly go.

The fact that same behaviors don't happen on Linux devices, even with something like four of fresh 18650s, means the list ends before it begins. They probably don't do ANY power profiling AT ALL. I'm sure they don't do ANY environmental testing, either.

Would I accept that as a consumer? No. Would I if I was the manufacturer? ...

[sharperguy]

This is a big part of why Android was developed in the first place. The operating system and application architecture that makes sense on desktop just doesn't make sense on mobile. Despite the many problems Google's restrictive APIs which you are forced to use can cause for developers, they are also highly optimized for power usage.

[jeroenhd]

The architecture can work if enough smart people are put to work on it. That's how Apple managed to turn macOS into a mobile operating system.

I think UBPorts and Sailfish prove that Linux for phones is practical if you're willing to rely on Linux applications that stick to mobile friendly APIs.

You need to configure and compile your Linux kernel for aggressive power saving, of course. Seeing how Linux currently struggles to effectively do power management on laptops without S3 sleep, there's plenty of work to be done if you want to use it with a phone.

It's not just about app developers either, Qualcomm's modifications to the Linux kernel are public thanks to GPL but most phone kernel modifications haven't made it into the upstream kernel so far. Projects like postmarketOS are trying to make things better but it's not easy to port practical code that works into code that's acceptable for the maintainers of the broader Linux project.

[blueflow]

Android is also Linux, so Linux isn't the problem - its the userspace. In terms of wakeups, the systemd/dbus desktop architecture is the worst.

[gf000]

I would argue that the legacy OS and app architecture we have on desktop OSs doesn't make sense there, either.

It's a model that worked fine in multi-user setups where you ran a single executable, so that the security per user was meaningful, but today it just sucks.

Android is quite elegant in reusing the Linux kernel's permission system, but on a granularity that actually makes sense (apps are started as separate users, and they just elevated their concept of user a level higher).

[Katzenmann]

Hi. I have a Google Pixel 3a running PostmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ and it holds up pretty well. My phone lost 20% today with light usage and will maybe lose 60% if I scroll social media a lot.

I was actually surprised it is this good. I reinstalled recently and before the reinstall I had much worse battery life (Maybe 8 hours with normal usage). I think it was because of Syncthing running in the background.

It is also possible to use s2idle suspend which will improve the battery life even more but you will not be able to receive calls during suspend (though that may also be fixed in the future)

[fsflover]

Did you know that you can replace the battery in Librem 5 and Pinephone on the go?

[fossman]

They are just like tiny laptops, so you can certainly shutdown and swap the battery.

[nicman23]

yeah there are lots of tablets and 2-1 with amd chips that can do 8 hours on light usage.

[poetaster]

With my, atypical maybe?, use, I get up to 2 days on a 4KmA battery (Gigaset GS5, SailfishOs). Sometimes I'm down to 1 day if I do social media scrolling.

[cranberryturkey]

My HP laptop lasts 2 hours running linux. My macbook air m4 lasts 12 hours.

[shaky-carrousel]

Your MacBook air has a team behind it ensuring it runs as efficiently as possible. Your HP laptop running linux has... you.

[fossman]

Well, if enough of us paid Apple level prices to Linux vendors, we would have Apple level Linux laptops and phones eventually. Not fair to pay next to nothing and then compare Linux to Apple.

[type0]

apples to oranges