Is it normal to get less than half the battery life on ubuntu compared to windows?

I have read a lot of similar questions on askubuntu but all of them mention losing not more than an hour or two of battery life and even then just suggest tlp. For me, I get 6.5 hours of battery life on Windows 10 (battery saving mode) but only 3 hours of battery life on Ubuntu. I installed tlp which increased it by half an hour. Is this normal?

I did find this but it is 7 years old and doesn't have answers anyway. The one answer there is suggests powertop but doesn't elaborate what is to be done next. I did try installing powertop but it didn't make any difference whatsoever.

sudo apt install powertop
sudo powertop --autotune

I should mention that these are on the same laptop but windows 10 - which came preinstalled on 256 GB SSD while Ubuntu was installed by me on the first 200 GB partition of the HDD. Could the SSD-HDD thing be making this difference?

Also, have I missed enabling some setting in tlp? I couldn't find what configuration you should use with it so I'm using it as is.

sudo apt install tlp
sudo tlp start

Is there something else that can be done to improve the battery life? I have been Ubuntu on a desktop without problems but this is the first time I'm using it on a laptop.

Edit: Laptop is Dell Inspiron 15 3000. Ubuntu is 21.04.

1 Answer

(It's been a long time so I guess my question isn't getting answered. Anyway, I'll post what I've learnt so far...)

Yes, it is normal.

In fact you should expect around 30% to 50% loss in battery life unless you are using something like a Thinkpad. This isn't Ubuntu's fault and it has to do with manufacturers (even mainstream ones like Dell and HP) keeping their proprietary drivers exclusive to Microsoft. I have noticed that even on replacing Ubuntu with Arch (no desktop environment, only dwm + firefox + some command line programs) I was getting no better battery life. Thus, I believe this problem isn't just with Ubuntu but all linux distros as of now (same reason).

In short, if battery life is your concern, either stick with what came pre-installed in your laptop or be prepared to get your hands dirty.