X220 Linux battery life?

[speedy11131]

I was wondering if someone could recommend me a user-friendly Linux distro that would get good battery life on an X220. The reason I ask is I have the extended 11 hour (supposedly) battery that I purchased with the laptop and yet I'm only getting about 4 hours out of it on Linux Mint, yet on Windows with the same brightness and usage I would get about 7-8 hours. Did Lenovo's engineers do some black magic with their Windows drivers? I really don't care if I have to wipe and install another distro, battery life is more important, however I would rather stay away from Windows (have enough of those machines already).

 

[FreedomEclipse]

is youre X220 the i3 or the i5 model?? also its worth noting that there are 8 and 9 cell batteries available for the X220 (according to some quick research on google) might be worth possibly having a spare battery???

Others swap the mechanical HDD out for an SSD, that should buy a 45mins-1hr+ of battery life depending on your usage

 

[Peter1986C]

1) Use Htop or Conky to see whether the CPU scales down properly when idle. In the terminal, do the folowing:

sudo apt-get install htop

and then yo do

htop

It should be showing idle clocks if nothing else is running.
2) I believe that Linux Mint has the problem of excessive desktop effects, by having all effects Compiz has to offer enabled. You could try to disable some (forgot how to do that exactly) or get rid of that &%# Compiz altogether and use Metacity as your WM. In the latter case you will not have any desktop effects, however.

 

[speedy11131]

is youre X220 the i3 or the i5 model?? also its worth noting that there are 8 and 9 cell batteries available for the X220 (according to some quick research on google) might be worth possibly having a spare battery???

Others swap the mechanical HDD out for an SSD, that should buy a 45mins-1hr+ of battery life depending on your usage

I have the i5 model, as well as a 9 cell battery. I have an SSD for my desktop atm, not enough to afford another though, but maybe down the line.

1) Use Htop or Conky to see whether the CPU scales down properly when idle. In the terminal, do the folowing:

sudo apt-get install htop

and then yo do

htop

It should be showing idle clocks if nothing else is running.
2) I believe that Linux Mint has the problem of excessive desktop effects, by having all effects Compiz has to offer enabled. You could try to disable some (forgot how to do that exactly) or get rid of that &%# Compiz altogether and use Metacity as your WM. In the latter case you will not have any desktop effects, however.

I will try that thanks, I have run powertop and enabled a tweak in grub so that should help some more .
Edit: Would Cinnamon included in LM 13 (I have 12) help or hinder in any way (disabling the desktop effects obviously?)

Based on the responses from you two, I'm assuming linux distros don't have any noticeable battery life differences amongst each other? IE Would I be better off using a Fedora based distro for example? Or the difference would be negligible?

 

[Peter1986C]

I have no experience with Cinnamon, and the fact that I stopped using Mint after version 11 is not very helpful either.

Well, perhaps Aptosid with XFCE or KDE Lite might squeeze more battery life out, assuming decent power management settings in use (both are really leightweight). Aptosid is a fork of Debian so a lot is like you are used to (even though uit is closer to Debian than Mint, of course).