ubuntu vs mac os battery life on macbook air

* Gentoo Linux, hand-configured kernel v3.0.6 Combine that with hardware accelerated H.264 decoding that you don't get in OS X (in both mplayer2 and VLC), CPU voltage control (Core 2 Duo only), and you get monster battery life out of such a small machine. 12 hours is better than the highest estimate I got in OS X (11 hours). In this post, I won't go into details about power saving optimisation and what's left to do (there's still room for improvement), but I'm so pleased with the current result that I thought I would share it with other MBA enthusiasts.

I'm currently trying my hands on it before doing the same on a 4,2 (mid 2011, 13', i5). Result on 720p playback: +1h57 or +42% battery life. VLC, HW accel off: ~ 3h45 (there must be room for improvement as the video was choppy, surprising for VLC).X264 video, MKV container, muted, from SSD (ext4 on LVM), Wi-Fi X was running with XMonad (1 workspace and 2 tiles), urxvt, Chromium (1 tab), Wi-Fi Such good hardware deserves an even better and fully tunable OS. Hopefully that will motivate more people to install Linux* on their MBA.

Ubuntu vs mac os battery life on macbook air