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zayn7lie

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Registered: 2023-07-02

Posts: 37

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[SOLVED] Does different adoption of WM/DE affact laptop battery life?

I am going to switch from XFCE to sway or Hyprland, but I am a little concerned about the battery life of my laptop.

I have searched online about battery life experiment but found few blogs about it. And those blogs is only about the comparation of different DE like XFCE or Gnome and focusing on RAM instead of cpu/GPU usage which effect the overall battery life hugely.

Does anyone have a experience of different DE and WM? Would sway or Hyprland consume more battery than XFCE?

Last edited by zayn7lie (2023-08-16 23:46:47)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,484

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Re: [SOLVED] Does different adoption of WM/DE affact laptop battery life?

The choice of WM/Compositor has no impact at all on battery life.  Period.

The choice of DE in and of itself would not impact battery life, however, some DEs will include in their collection of software default power management settings which could affect battery life.  But these settings are not specific to the DE - they just come pre-packaged with the DE software.  You can replicate the same power management settings on any DE or with any WM/Compositor.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

dogknowsnx

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Re: [SOLVED] Does different adoption of WM/DE affact laptop battery life?

My 5 cents: Having used XFCE only at the very beginning of my Linux journey, but on the same "outdated" machine on which I'm still running sway, it is safe to say that sway definitely doesn't use more battery (rather less - but  then there are so many more factors involved) on this specific hardware (Eeepc, Intel atom - crippling on the DOZE anno Linus).

seth

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From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,684

Re: [SOLVED] Does different adoption of WM/DE affact laptop battery life?

A (GL) compositor might well keep GPU (and CPU "more") busy than plain X11 (notably fancy stuff like hyprland might)
Howerver, the uncomposited system might cause more redraws what can outweigh the compositor overhead.
And of course it matters whether/which GPU is kept in what state in response to what.
(nb. that xfce is compositing by default and gnome mandatorily)

tl;dr: depends.
A general answer isn't possible, you'll have to compare the impact for your scenario , eg. monitoring powertop.

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zayn7lie

Member

Registered: 2023-07-02

Posts: 37

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Does different adoption of WM/DE affact laptop battery life?

OK, I get it. Thanks for your introductions!