Ask HN: Battery life for graphical Linux VMs (or Asahi) on Apple Silicon laptops

3•evertedsphere•6mo ago

I'm considering getting a 16" MacBook Pro as a daily driver, but I am unlikely to be able to switch to macOS, so I'm looking at either Asahi on an M1/M2 device or a graphical Linux VM (not limited to ≤M2 devices) in which I do all my work. For what it's worth, most of what I'm doing in a day is running rustc on a large monorepo.

I wouldn't expect great battery life from Asahi yet, but I haven't been able to find much real data besides that it's…less good. Any concrete numbers from those of you daily driving it for specific workflows?

Similarly, what's the battery hit like from working primarily in a VM? I haven't been able to find much in the way of testimonials online. I'm sure there's some hit from having the VM's scheduler / power management do the job of their macOS counterparts, but how bad is it?

Comments

IronWolve•6mo ago

About 50-75%, also depends on cpu workload and brightness.

Running a VM will probably give you better life.

runjake•6mo ago

Do not buy a MacBook Pro to run Linux on it. You will regret it.

If you want to run Linux on a laptop, get a Framework laptop or something else with a Ryzen AI series chip[1] in it. Heck, a Ryzen 8000 series processor would probably be more than enough for your use case as described.

Presumably you're developing for x64 servers, so having the same processor arch is a good bonus.

1. https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/consumer/ryzen-ai...

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