It's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today.
I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
The iGPU in Panther Lake has me pretty excited about intel for the first time in a long time. Lunar Lake proved they’re still relevant; Panther Lake will show whether they can actually compete.
Equal effort is far more likely from Qualcomm than hardware docs. They don't even freely share docs with partners, and many important things are restricted even from their own engineers. I've seen military contractors less paranoid than QCOM.
I'd have to say that full hardware documentation, even under NDA, is prerequisite to claim equal effort. The expectation on a desktop platform (that is, explicitly not mobile, like phones or tablets) is that development is mostly open for those who want to, and Qualcomm's business is sort of fundamentally counter to that. So either they're going to have to change those expectations (which I would prefer not to happen), provide more to manufacturers, or expect that their market performance will be poor.
I mean I feel like once one of the ARM chipmakers can lend a hand on the software side it should be a landslide.
Google and Samsung managed to make very successful Chromebooks together, but IIRC there was a bunch of back and forth to make the whole thing boot quickly and sip battery power.
> Does anyone know why Linux laptop battery life is so bad?
It's extremely dependent on the hardware and driver quality. On ARM and contemporary x86 that's even more true, because (among other things) laptops suspend individual devices ("suspend-to-idle" or "S0ix" or "Modern Standby"), and any one device failing to suspend properly has a disproportionate impact.
That said, to a first approximation, this is a case where different people have wildly different experiences, and people who buy high-end well-supported hardware experience a completely different world than people who install Linux on whatever random hardware they have. For instance, Linux on a ThinkPad has excellent battery life, sometimes exceeding Windows.
My Dell XPS had pretty good battery life on linux. Probably better than on windows. But Dell sells the XPS wiht linux preinstalled. So I assume it has a lot to do with the drivers. Many notebooks have custom chips inside or some weird bios that works together with a windows program. I'd say laptops are more diverse than desktop PCs with of the shelve hardware.
I ran into this problem on a Slimbook some years ago now. I found that my battery drained way too fast in standby, and I remember determining that this was some (relatively common) problem with sleep states, that some linux machines couldn't really enter/stay in a deeper sleep state, so my Slimbook's standby wasn't much of a standby at all.
Install powertop, the "tunables" tab has a list of system power saving settings you can toggle through the UI. I've seen them make a pretty big difference, but YMMV of course.
It's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today.
I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.
The iGPU in Panther Lake has me pretty excited about intel for the first time in a long time. Lunar Lake proved they’re still relevant; Panther Lake will show whether they can actually compete.
Forget equal effort: Start off with hardware docs.
Equal effort is far more likely from Qualcomm than hardware docs. They don't even freely share docs with partners, and many important things are restricted even from their own engineers. I've seen military contractors less paranoid than QCOM.
I'd have to say that full hardware documentation, even under NDA, is prerequisite to claim equal effort. The expectation on a desktop platform (that is, explicitly not mobile, like phones or tablets) is that development is mostly open for those who want to, and Qualcomm's business is sort of fundamentally counter to that. So either they're going to have to change those expectations (which I would prefer not to happen), provide more to manufacturers, or expect that their market performance will be poor.
While I almost certainly wouldn't have done more than wished for one, it's a shame they're not getting any return for their effort.
I mean I feel like once one of the ARM chipmakers can lend a hand on the software side it should be a landslide.
Google and Samsung managed to make very successful Chromebooks together, but IIRC there was a bunch of back and forth to make the whole thing boot quickly and sip battery power.
Does anyone know why Linux laptop battery life is so bad? Is it a case of devices needing to be turned off that aren't? Poor CPU scheduling?
> Does anyone know why Linux laptop battery life is so bad?
It's extremely dependent on the hardware and driver quality. On ARM and contemporary x86 that's even more true, because (among other things) laptops suspend individual devices ("suspend-to-idle" or "S0ix" or "Modern Standby"), and any one device failing to suspend properly has a disproportionate impact.
That said, to a first approximation, this is a case where different people have wildly different experiences, and people who buy high-end well-supported hardware experience a completely different world than people who install Linux on whatever random hardware they have. For instance, Linux on a ThinkPad has excellent battery life, sometimes exceeding Windows.
Are there any repositories of documented battery life behavior?
My Dell XPS had pretty good battery life on linux. Probably better than on windows. But Dell sells the XPS wiht linux preinstalled. So I assume it has a lot to do with the drivers. Many notebooks have custom chips inside or some weird bios that works together with a windows program. I'd say laptops are more diverse than desktop PCs with of the shelve hardware.
I ran into this problem on a Slimbook some years ago now. I found that my battery drained way too fast in standby, and I remember determining that this was some (relatively common) problem with sleep states, that some linux machines couldn't really enter/stay in a deeper sleep state, so my Slimbook's standby wasn't much of a standby at all.
But that's just one problem, I bet.
Install powertop, the "tunables" tab has a list of system power saving settings you can toggle through the UI. I've seen them make a pretty big difference, but YMMV of course.