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by pojntfx17 hours ago |
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upvoteby michaelt16 hours ago|
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A lot of office workers these days spend a lot of time in video calls.

So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding.

Linux is something of a second-class citizen for both GPU vendors and browser vendors. So for example if you're using Firefox and an nvidia GPU on Linux? No video encode/decode acceleration for you. The browser will silently switch to CPU decoding.

This translates into worse battery life.

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upvoteby pwnna16 hours ago|
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HW video decoding is now available and by default on in Chrome on at least Ubuntu with my Intel iGPU. I was also surprised when they turned it on under the radar. I saw this the other day debugging a problem and saw others see it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1ojydv9/comment/nm8...
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upvoteby temp082614 hours ago|
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HW decoding works fine. But some distros (looking at you Fedora) have legal issues around providing it out of the box.
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upvoteby giancarlostoro16 hours ago|
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Call me crazy, but most people working typically leave their laptops wired in to either a charger or a hub so they can have more monitors. I know some people will go through the effort of charging and pulling the cord, and charging later, but most people don't want to micromanage something they can forget about while working. If you're living on battery life for a work call, it would not matter if you're on Windows, changes are high your batterly life will self-terminate quicker than you realize.
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upvoteby michaelt16 hours ago|
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Among Linux users, long battery life is for in-office workers (who leave their desk to attend meetings) in hybrid companies (where no meetings are laptop-free) in roles that sometimes involve back-to-back meetings.
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upvoteby d3Xt3r7 hours ago|
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But these people would already have a company-provisioned laptop.
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upvoteby jim334423 hours ago|
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I thought the idea was the Framework is the company-provisioned one. Or are they letting people do corp work on personal laptops?
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upvoteby dtj11237 hours ago|
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I don't want to maintain state on two laptops
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upvoteby eloisant4 hours ago|
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With the right tooling, the state is minimal and gets synchronized between laptops.
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upvoteby mmcnl16 hours ago|
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CPU decoding/encoding for video means warm chassis + spinning fans. Fan noise is very annoying with video calls.
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upvoteby JohnTHaller16 hours ago|
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Firefox has had GPU video decoding in Linux on by default since 2023 for Intel and 2025 for AMD from what I've read
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upvoteby jampekka17 hours ago|
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> I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.

They ship with Ubuntu on it, which would be quite natural choice for such benchmark. Also they do do the standby test on Ubuntu for some reason.

Can't help but suspect there's a reason why Linux numbers are not given. :(

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upvoteby cogman1017 hours ago|
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There have been fairly recent changes to the linux kernel to better support panther lake in terms of power performance. I'd suspect a major reason for holding back is because ubuntu 26.04 has not been released yet and it is using kernel 7.0 which includes these power improvements. 24.04 does not.

By the time these laptops start shipping, 26.04 should be released and testing should be easy. I suspect no major differences from it vs windows.

7.1 includes even more performance improvements for panther lake. [1]

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Enabled-Intel-FRED

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upvoteby pinum16 hours ago|
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If I was releasing a laptop with Linux support as a key selling point, and the battery life was bad on Ubuntu 24.04 but good on the pre-release 26.04, then I'd advertise the good figures and write "tested on Ubuntu 26.04 beta, requires Linux 7.0 or later" in the footnotes.

I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.

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upvoteby ssl-315 hours ago|
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I'm a long-time Linux user who might actually be in the market for a just-works upgradeable laptop[1] that comes with Ubuntu.

I already know that combinations of hardware and software can be stretched and tweaked to do really interesting things in really excellent ways. I don't need them to tell me that computer systems are flexible. That's just noise.

And I don't want them to tell me how their (unreleased) hardware might work in the future with some unreleased/beta software. That tends to be interpreted as speculation, or as lies and deceit.

I'd prefer to see benchmarks of how it works if it shipped today.

If those benchmarks are unsavory (as they may presently be) and thus omitted, then that's not ideal but it's okay.

I definitely don't want to feel as if I'm being lied to, in place of an omission.

[1]: I just want a 15" version. I'm not a fan of little screens. My eyes aren't getting any better.

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upvoteby d3Xt3r7 hours ago|
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They have a 16" version btw.
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