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Kernel Bug Means Linux Power Usage Remains High
An anonymous reader writes "The significant Linux kernel power regression reported back in April, which ended up being attributed to PCI-E Active State Power Management, is still not resolved even as Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16 approach. Until Linux is able to handle ASPM in a manner more like Windows or the device drivers explicitly set the ASPM flag, users of many modern laptops need to use the "pcie_aspm=force" option to regain much of their battery life. At least a power bug affecting newer Intel hardware with the "energy performance bias" feature has been fixed. There's more information in this LaunchPad bug report and in the latest power consumption testing."
This is the kind of thing that makes linux a poor choice on the desktop. While the fix is correct from a technical perspective, it fails the "Grandma Test". If you're incredibly technical, no problem. Grandma, however, isn't going to know and understand how to enable ASPM via grub.conf. Her response is probably going to be, "Why are there worms in my computer?" A better route would be to develop a test to detect the error condition on the install of the OS, then save the configuration accordingly.
Grandma is also not going to be knowledge about the other ins and outs of kernel tuning her system that are discussed in the linked to article. A mechanism needs to be in place to adjust these settings when the user changes what power source their computer is using. This is a standard feature on both Mac and Windows. As most linux development is primarily focused on servers, fixing this type of thing unfortunately isn't likely to happen. I used to use linux on the desktop, then when OSX came out because I didn't have to do these kinds of adjustments. When I started my current job, I tried out Ubuntu because it was supposed to have resolved this kind of thing. Better (until Unity, WTF were they thinking?), but "it just works" remains illusive. I've now left linux on the desktop twice, and I'm technically proficient. Why do you think Grandma wants to use Windows?