Best OS to use for battery life

[screwd01]

I've been using Chromebooks for while and decided to roll my own cheapo laptop. Found a 11.6 Acer with a Celeron N2830 Dual-core 2.16 GHz. It has a spinning HDD and 2GB ram. I'm stoked to see it's running Xubuntu is running quite well and showing 6 hours of battery life. I've ordered an SSD and will be maxing out the ram.

Is there any other flavors I should try? I love Elementary OS but that seems it might be too have, same with Ubuntu Gnome. Kubuntu might do well. I've never strayed away from Ubuntu based flavors, should I try something like Debian?

 

[replica9000]

Have you tried Linux Mint (Ubuntu based), or LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition)?

 

[screwd01]

I actually have Cinnamon installed on the HDD right now. SSD should be here tomorrow.
Even though it has a bit more eye candy than Xubuntu, it seems to get just as good battery life.
As a test, I've tested the Win 10 Preview and it was nowhere as smooth as either.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Xubuntu 14.04 on my Dell laptop running Windows in a VM kills my battery pretty fast. I probably could stand to tune it some. I think, depending on the hardware, you can definitely get better and worse results from one OS to the next. There have been some threads in the linux forums about tuning battery life, but hardware vs OS specifics change so much, it's tough to say how much you can really do to make things better.

6 hours sounds pretty good.

 

[replica9000]

The SSD will probably make a bigger impact on battery life than the differences between most Linux distributions.

 

[screwd01]

I've installed the new hardware and will put it through its paces the next few days. I've stuck with Cinnamon since it seems to be extremely user friendly and this is the first machine on which I'll be using Linux full time.

Here's a little gem I've found from 2008: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2445/16

And the battery life estimator it showing more than 8 hours...I know I can't trust that but it's awesome to see.

 

[ninaholic37]

On Slacko Puppy Linux I have the option to set the frequency to always 600mhz so it will never tax my CPU and run at 7.5W TDP instead of 21W TDP:

I'm guessing other distros have similar Power Saving features. Since you're already using Bay Trail though my guess is that the brightness level of your Screen may have more impact on battery. Disabling wi-fi if you're not using it might help too.

 

[ktehmok]

FWIW, I'm not sure any distro is better than another when it comes to power consumption. Unless you're gonna forego a desktop and run command line for everything. Two programs that will help are "laptop-mode-tools" and "powertop". I used them when battery life was critical and they helped a lot. Both should be on sourceforge. If you don't plan on using the cdrom, take it out. That saves power.