I’ll wait to see if they have proper “sleep” mode such that they don’t keep draining batter while not in use, particularly when running Linux. This is something that baffles me about non Apple Laptops how they just refuse to catch up to such a great benefit.. (alongside the trackpad experience which I can may be live with).
Many laptops these days only implement s2idle and no proper s3 support which is the main culprit. My lenovo only does a day (at best) in s2idle under linux (windows is worse), when I switched it to s3 it does about 4 days as expected for the amd cpu. Fortunately this has a switch in the bios (which says windows won't work afterwards which is cow manure). You get the added benefit that windows can't phone home when you close the lid.
Same for mine, there's even a long thread about it in Lenovo's forum (T14 gen1).
I still think 4 days is not really great compared to my previous MacBook that could sleep for weeks.
Battery life is bad overall for this, at least on the sister T14s gen1. Is it the same experience for you and what tweaks have you made to increase battery life?
According to this thread we might never get AMD pstate driver working.
I enabled the pstate driver yesterday for my T14s gen3 (AMD). It almost doubled my battery life, the fan never spins anymore and it's very very quiet and cool now. You need to specifically enable it in Linux kernel, this is how I did it:
Yes battery life is awful since day 1. I initially thought I had a faulty device or something. Apart from that the machine is great, it's really a shame.
I tried a lot of various things mentioned in the forum, updated the BIOS, tested plenty of various configurations, to no avail.
It's a bit crazy that it's been so long and it's still a major pain point for me on Linux. Apart from that, I really enjoy the machine. Not really an issue when it's plugged in at home, but annoying on the go...
I think the idea is that Windows will occasionally not wake up properly, leaving the user to “choke it out” (power button for 5 sec to force a hard shut down, power button to power up). Sorry if you had any unsaved work.
Personally, Hibernate works great, doesn’t require any battery life to sustain it, and always comes back with state intact, so it’s my go to.
Extremely false: hibernate is way slower. Sleep happens within a second and awakes within a second. Hibernate requires writing all your memory to disk; if you have, say, 15GB of memory in use and a disk that can read and write at 1 GB/sec (far from the fastest, but also extremely far from the slowest), that’s fifteen seconds. For many (probably most) people’s realistic situations, hibernate will take over a minute.
(Heh, my own laptop takes 4–8 minutes to hibernate if its CPU is slowed to 400 MHz to minimise power consumption, which incidentally happens automatically when it’s almost down to 0% battery power, shortly after which it triggers a suspend-then-hibernate, and the extra time that makes it take it brings it perilously close to running out of power before it finishes. Not certain why limiting the CPU has such a massive effect, but I’ve compared it when manually inducing similar circumstances by giving the CPU an impossibly low power envelope with `ryzenadj --stapm-limit 100 --fast-limit 100 --slow-limit 100`, which limits all cores to 400 MHz, and yeah, that makes hibernate slow.)
It might be a bit of tinkering but you can enable suspend-then-hibernate with logind/systemd which gives you a similar setup to Macbooks but slightly slower to wake from deep sleep as it needs to go through post/grub again. With the bigger battery provide and new CPU I do hope it lasts longer when idle though.
Thats an understatement. I never made suspend-then-hibernate work reliable on linux and I tried it over the years on different systems. So I just had developed the habit of always entering hibernation, if I intend to close the lid for longer.
On windows suspend-then-hibernate never failed so far.
Drivers are just the crux with linux in too many cases. Not much you can do about it, except reverse engeneering drivers as a side project.
I use it too it's not hard to setup and works well (with very few exceptions and if you use a "recent" enough linux kernel, depending on your hardware).
Once hibernation is setup just set systemd [Login]HandleLidSwitch=suspend-then-hibernate and maybe configure the delay with [Sleep]HibernateDelaySec=5min.
Hibernation most times works nice too (even with Full Disk Encryption (FDE)) there is just one gotcha, lockdown mode is currently fundamentally incompatible with hibernation (even through it's docs seem to imply something else, they refer to a not yet existing feature). And some distros enable lockdown mode by default if you use a proper FDE setup. Leading to a lot of confusion about hibernation suposedly not working anymore in linux or being incompatible with FDE.
You can also reverse engeneer the firmware if you like, but as a matter of fact, it always worked reliable with windows laptops and not one single time with linux for me (open for suggestions of stable hw). And I am not a kernel dev, but I am pretty sure drivers are in general involved with waking up and sleeping as well. There are just lots of things, that can go wrong there. One small bug somewhere can result in blocking the hibernation => result is a drained battery.
it mainly lacks good UI/UX tools to do so and an agreement on what the right approach is, especially if combined with raid
without raid it's not too hard, just bothersome and finding the right information can be annoying
the main gotcha is that lockdown mode is incompatible with hibernation (no matter if it's encrypted or not) and some distros enable it by default when secure boot is used, which is most times the case with a full disk encryption setup
Maybe its just me, but I've found Macbooks to be worse for this
I have a Macbook Air, M1, which I don't use regularly but turn off after every use. When I go to turn it back on again, the battery's completely dead. I haven't had that from any non-apple laptop for a long time, and I sometimes go +6 months without turning them on
The trackpad though I'm in agreement with. I never understood why people use an external trackpad with their imacs until I used it on the macbook
