Can Ubuntu Linux Consume Less Power Than Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "Now that the big Linux kernel power regression has been solved it looks like Ubuntu 11.04 can compete with Microsoft Windows 7 in terms of overall power usage. New tests revealed by Phoronix show the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7 operating systems. On a range of different systems, the power consumption of the Linux OS was comparable to that of Windows except for a few select workloads and systems."

Comments

"Can" is not "Does"

[Kagetsuki]

It is possible it could consume less power, but that doesn't necessarily mean it always does. Different hardware, specialty drivers, default settings vs tweaked settings - come on?

Can it crash less often than Windows?

[spiffmastercow]

Ever since I upgraded my netbook to Ubuntu 11.04, it crashes randomly and often. I'm talking more that Windows 95 with no patches. Hell, more than Windows 3.0. While solving power management would be nice, it's a moot point if the computer is always off because I can never use it.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[vbraga]

I've had a few kernel panics (UI freezes and caps lock lights keeps blinking) since I upgraded to 11.04. It doesn't happens when I'm running Windows.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[Kjella]

Since there's no telling if you have the same model or even brand of network, this conversation is a bit like "The fruit I ate had a hard shell, I almost cracked a tooth" "Mine didn't, perhaps your fruit was defective?" It's another easy way to blame something else, because how many have spare identical netbooks to rule that out? Sure it could happen, but it's far from the most likely explanation.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[Andy Dodd]

11.04 seems to include a kernel with LOTS of regressions, or the Ubuntu maintainers added some to the kernel/modules packages.

For example, the wireless drivers for Ralink RT2860 chipsets were rock solid from 9.04 to 10.10, but were completely broken after an 11.04 update. Even after doing some module blacklist magic, the wireless drivers now perform horrifically and fail to connect very often.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[ngileadi]

Well, I don't know what problem spiffmastercow had, but this bug has been around since the launch of 11.04, and crashes my laptop on a regular basis.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[Pausanias]

It may not be the hardware. Non-LTS Ubuntus are full of regressions. Affects some significant minority of users, but not enough to affect ship date.

The worst regressions are always fixed in the next release. They are rarely backported to non-LTS, a strategy which is designed to keep you constantly upgrading. Except that once one regression is fixed, more creep up. If you're lucky, your won't be affected. But there are ALWAYS regressions.

I basically treat non-LTS Ubuntus as betas for the LTS. I don't expect them to work. I expect many things to be broken. Many of the regressions are insidious---you don't discover them until later in the game. And, dirty secret is that once LTS is long in the tooth, only security updates get backported to LTS. Got a non-functioning file open dialog? Too bad, not going to backport the fix to LTS, you can rot in hell or upgrade. (read the final few comments, where the dev tells me I need to upgrade from LTS to non-LTS to get back a functioning file open dialog box.)

Bitter much? Yes I am, for a fan that's been with them for 7 years now.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[spiffmastercow]

I love how everyone immediately assumes it's a hardware issue, when I clearly specified that the problems only started when I upgraded to 11.04. Again, it worked fine on all previous version of Ubuntu (down to 10.04), but took a shit when I upgraded to 11.04. But rather than acknowledge the problem, all the linux fanboys just put their fingers in their ears and shout "hardware problem" at the top of their lungs.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[amliebsch]

Really? I never you could recover from a kernel panic by switching to a terminal and restarting X! Mod parent INFORMATIVE!!!++ Thank you so much!!

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[tmetzcc325]

I've been using Lubuntu 11.04 on my Asus S101 EeePC with the 32GB SSD, and it has been great. Way more responsive than standard Ubuntu. And more stable. The battery life still sucks, though that might be a knock against Asus since the battery life has sucked since I was running UNR on it a couple years ago.

Re:Yes it can.

[nemasu]

MacGyver??
Heck, even if your battery did by chance run out, you could probably just make one from some gum, a few lemons and a couple pieces of metal.

Re:Did they use the xfree ati / nv drivers or the

[ratboy666]

Please read the article:

"The respective proprietary graphics driver for each operating system was installed"

Re:Yes it can.

[carpenoctem63141]

Yeah, but if you don't have it, your only other option is to kick ass.

That depends.

[degeneratemonkey]

In my experience, it depends on the hardware to some extent.

For example, consider that newer laptop GPU setups (using NVIDIA Optimus and whatever ATI calls their equivalent) use "switchable graphics." Essentially the output device is always a cheap integrated device, but when real GPU power is needed the OS will seamlessly switch over to a separate, bona fide GPU and have its framebuffers forwarded to the integrated chip.

This requires kernel-level support for the switchable graphics systems -- support that does not exist in the Linux kernel.

Because of this, the GPUs in these systems constantly operate at full power despite never actually producing rendered framebuffers. This eats laptop batteries alive.

Re:Yes it can.

[Surt]

No, it can't.

I swallowed a battery earlier today, and I think that proves you wrong. Also, grrrkfa;dlsjdkafjsdiedjiruacvnc

Power Consumed is the Least of my Ubuntu Worries

[gamrillen]

Whenever Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu, I'm always game to take it for a test drive. I use an EeePC 1005HA netbook and a VirtualBox VM (Windows 7 x64 host) to do my testing. For the last three versions (10.10, 11.04, and 11.10) I've had issues with the netbook overheating and shutting down the hardware. Additionally, the sleep/hibernation functionality never seems to work just right. Sometimes, when I close the netbook, it won't go to sleep at all and the LCD screen will stay turned on. Other times, the netbook will sleep peacefully, but won't boot back up when I open the lid (as set in my preferences) or hit the power button. I have to remove the battery and do a hard boot. As for the VM, Ubuntu runs incredibly slow even with the guest additions installed. I have to sometimes triple click on single click buttons to select something, and Gnome likes to generate random error messages. On the flip side, I can run Windows 7 x32, Windows 7 x64, and even Windows XP x32 on the netbook, and won't have any of the issues I see with Ubuntu. The same goes for using the three Windows variants mentioned above in the VM. Yes, less power consumption is a great thing, and yes it's awesome that interface tweaks are happening to make it prettier, but until stability issues with fairly common chip-sets are resolved, I won't be using Ubuntu on a daily basis. However, Linux Mint, which is based on the most current stable release of Ubuntu seems to take all of Ubuntu's shortcomings and clean them up. Mint just seems... tighter. Everything flows better, and I don't see the glitches that I normally see in Ubuntu.

Repeat after me, Ubuntu is not Linux ok

[RotateLeftByte]

There are far more usable and frankly higher quality distros than anything that comes from Canonical.

I'll probably be shot down in flames but as a long term linux supporter (since slackware 1.1 on Floppies) I've seen it evolve beyond all recognition.
At first Ubuntu was a breath of freah air. It took the debian dinosaur and shook it alive. Now, they are changing things and IMHO not taking the user base with them. I know of at least 10 former Ubuntu fans who have jumped ship since 10.10 came out. The quality is just not there any more. Far too much is crammed into each release with little thought for fixing the bugs.
Non of their stuff seems complete. Or in agile dev speak, 'It is not done.'
This is totally wrong and is only storing up a vast reservior of technial debt for the future.

Let the flaming begin.
Anon coz I have to work closely with Canonical in my day job.
 

Re:Repeat after me, Ubuntu is not Linux ok

[Foxhoundz]

Call it what you want but Ubuntu looks to be the de facto OS that represents the Linux desktop market. Even when I ask my friends who are not familiar with too many Linux distros , the first thing they can come up is "Ubuntoo". As such, like it or not, Ubuntu is the only OS that I can think of that has the resources and the organization structure to compete with Windows. However, with the recent changes following 10.10, it seems that they're beginning to lose the competition. That's bad news for every other Linux distro in the desktop market. When Ubuntu loses, the Linux community loses in terms of popularity and reputation.

Re:Repeat after me, Ubuntu is not Linux ok

[marnues]

I don't think you use Ubuntu for the reasons that most people use Ubuntu. It is the user friendly version of Linux. I use it because I no longer care to do anything past install to correctly setup my machine. Ubuntu is the only flavor that has a fully functional setup for those of us that want to use the computer rather than playing sysadmin for a single user machine.

Re:Color Me Skeptical

[hitmark]

I suspect this is because, as found by Phoronix, Linux is unable to turn hardware off when it is not in use. This thanks to buggy ACPI or similar that the OEMs work around in their own drivers for Windows, but that the Linux devs have to find out about the hard way. Hell, not too long ago there was a desktop motherboard that was unbootable if Linux was honest about itself. This thanks to a garbage ACPI entry for anything other then Windows.

Linux 2.2 was better

[Billly Gates]

Linux has seriously regressed over the past decade. I remember when Linux was a lite alternative to Windows 2000 and had power management in software that was orders of magnitude better.

Those days are long gone.

I am sick and tired of playing with releases of Ubuntu and Fedora hoping this one will truly be unique and beat Windows. Last March I switched back to Windows 7 as I do not have time to tinker and fool around with older releases of gnome to avoid unity/gnome-shell, and trying to enable hardware GPU accelerated web browsing experience. If you want it to perform as good as Windows, then just use Windows.