Different battery duration for Windows 10 and Ubuntu on the same laptop

My Lenovo Legion Y520 laptop came with Windows 10, and I added Ubuntu 18.04 as dual boot around 2 months ago.

Based on my observations, I only get around 2 hours max usage in Ubuntu while I can get 3-4 hours of usage in Windows.

In both cases, I only do some basic stuff; checking emails, watching Youtube, doing some research, watching TV series, etc. I also do some coding (I'm currently making a nodejs project) in both of the OS's. I also observed that my laptop gets hotter when I'm using Ubuntu than when I'm using Windows.

What could be the reason for this?

Can I do anything to improve my laptop's battery life and temperature while I'm using Ubuntu?

thegreathypocrite

Posted 2018-10-23T08:35:50.543

Reputation: 151

2Have you tried just Googling for Ubuntu power management? – James P – 2018-10-23T08:37:51.480

I haven't done a side-by-side comparison, but I do find that watching videos in Ubuntu-based Linux goes through battery time pretty fast. I don't know that Ubuntu is different from other distros in this regard, but I use Ubuntu or Mint most of the time, so it's a data point. I haven't watched videos much in Windows, so I don't really know whether it's different. But of the general activities you describe, watching videos/TV eats battery time much faster than other activities. I don't know how much power the video portion takes, but I suspect the sound eats a lot of additional power. – fixer1234 – 2018-10-23T09:01:18.227

@fixer1234 Actually, the video decoding is usually the most power hungry part, especially on Linux where you often can't get proper working hardware acceleration for it. – Austin Hemmelgarn – 2018-10-23T19:12:10.920

Answers

This is pretty normal, for multiple reasons either way. In your case my first guess is that it's at least partly because of Lenovo optimizing their firmware for power efficiency with Windows (though I don't think they are actively sabotaging things for Linux despite the fact that some OEM's have done that before), with a close second being the NVIDIA GPU. NVIDIA drivers on Windows are known to be both more featureful and generally more energy efficient than the equivalent Linux drivers.

The real irony of the fact that this is so common is that Linux is often much better at using generic computing resources like processor time and memory.

Austin Hemmelgarn

Posted 2018-10-23T08:35:50.543

Reputation: 4 345

That is a common problem. You have to install TLP (Advanced Power Management) for Linux, that will significantly enhance you're battery life. You can find a lot of resources on the web on how to install it. Step by step with pictures as well as more compact ones depending on you're knowledge and you're Linux distribution.

Albin

Posted 2018-10-23T08:35:50.543

Reputation: 3 983

I followed what you said and installed TLP (I followed this video as my guide). But I don't really see any significant improvement. Maybe its still early to conclude so I'll just continue to observe and post here my observations in maybe a week of usage.

– thegreathypocrite – 2018-10-26T08:38:15.097

@thegreathypocrite yeah it's gonna be difficult to compare between two different operating systems, can you identify the source of the power drain? Usually power saving works the way that it disables HW/Applications which are not needed (for example Wifi) or "turning down" resources (e.g. lowering the CPU frequency). If you're problem is a power hungry application like video, of course that won't do you any good. Then we need to try a different approach. – Albin – 2018-10-26T18:22:42.397