Just thought I'd share a couple of unexpected positive benefits from switching from win11 to Zorin as my daily driver.
I put it on a second SSD in my Dell XPS 15 laptop. Since I got it over 2 years ago, even when doing almost nothing it would get quite hot and the fans would spin up to full speed. Even had a few thermal shutdown events in summertime (which cleaning the fans helped with).
The same hardware on Zorin runs SO much cooler and I barely ever hear the fans.
And linked to that the battery life is ridiculously longer, like about 3, possibly even 4 times longer! Seeing that much of an improvement is a bit insane.
Which is obviously also going to extend the life of the machine.
It all feels so much faster and snappier too, I've quickly become very at home with linux desktop & Zorin, although I have put in a huge number of hours over the last week getting everything set up and configured as well as learning huge amount.
It's my first real experience of just how inefficient windows really is, which got me thinking about how much that inefficiency must be contributing to energy usage and impact on global warming.
Bought the pro version last week too once I'd got far enough in to know it was going to work out for me.
Anyway, 1 week in from installing it, I don't think there's any going back now. Thanks Zorin for a great OS!
These anecdotal remarks are hard to quantify. Windows on a laptop will generally last longer versus Linux so it is hard to marry-up a cooler laptop with less battery life (Linux) and fans coming on due to a hotter CPU but more battery life (Windows). As long as the OS is meeting your needs - super!
It is interesting that you posted longer battery life with windoze. I have never read of anyone else having that experience. I have a Dell laptop that had 10 on it. When I switched to Linux my battery life more than tripled.
Although, I cannot say what the experience was with Zorin OS, I used Fedora KDE, Pop!_OS, and Ubuntu on the same laptop and I got the best time on my laptop with Fedora KDE. But it was less than Windows. Similar short term experiences on other distributions.
I wasn't referring to jhob101's comments. I was refering to the comment right above my post by C141ZorinOS. And to add I don't agree with the article he posted a link to. No matter what Linux OS I have tried, my experience has always been better battery life with Linux than windoze. Anyone can write an article making claims. Real world experience IMHO beats opinions.
Maybe we should start a poll and see what kind of battery life others have gotten after switching to Linux.
Wouldn't this statement be as hard to quantify as said message above? I mean.. it would make much sense to me that Linux uses far less power than Windows. Considering Windows does a lot of background checks, where Linux for the most part is about halfed if not even less than that. On idle you can expect Linux to be at roughly 0-2% cpu utilization, where on Windows it will often spike to 20-25-30%
Many users have posted on this forum on their real world issues of GnuLinux (Or Zorin OS) getting less battery life than Windows did before their switch.
For the last several years, I have been a member of daily troubleshooting here, seeing and trying to help resolve these complaints.
While a persons experience may speak louder to themselves than another persons anecdote, to them, your experience is just your anecdote with a statistical validity of One.
This is why anecdote does not equal evidence and why articles, even if you disagree due to them differing from your anecdotal experience, cannot be easily dismissed as mere "opinions" and "claims". That would be "cherry-picking the evidence."
As the article points out, battery life is not a simple thing. Windows OS is provided by Microsoft, a milti-trillion dollar entity that has the resources GnuLinux lacks.
Power management, driver efficiency, and software optimization are the primary things to consider for battery life. Windows has access to Hardware Support that GnuLinux does not. The Manufacturers work with MS closely while ignoring GnuLinux.
Proprietary Software provides the best drivers for Windows. On GnuLinux, drivers are community supported and can be less optimized.
Community support has less access to the proprietary code and at times, must guess as to the appropriate optimizations for driver configuration. It's not so easy.
Windows O.S. is bloated compared to the often far more trim GnuLinux distros, but M.S. has the money and resources to pay into Optimization of Power Management systems. In spite of being a ballooned whale, Windows often shows surprisingly good battery life which customers/consumers demand.
Mileage will vary and I have experienced both personally, with a trend toward better battery life on GnuLinux possibly due to my preferred use of Zorin OS Lite.
In my case, my new laptop's battery went from 9 hours on windows to 3 hours on Zorin. But on Kubuntu it goes up to nearly 10 hours, surpassing both OSs. While the slightly newer kernel and drivers may have contributed to most of this improvement, desktop environment does take a big role on power consumption, with KDE being much lighter than gnome (my older laptop could have the fans stop on idle in kde and run very smoothly on use, while gnome lagged on every single action -taking 2-4 seconds to open the zorin start menu, for example-)
While using tools like TLP is a good practice and (in my opinion) should be installed automatically if the installer detects the system has a battery, if your device has worse battery on linux than it did on windows, it is a good practice to try out multiple distros (even if it's just on the live environment) with different desktop environments and newer kernels if possible, to see if it makes a difference in the battery usage.
Interesting to read these reports. Hardware compatibility certainly has a major influence on the performance of each machine. Not necessarily related only to the amount of memory and processing capacity, but compatibility.
Even here on a more modest machine from 14 years ago, the Zorin 17 core is quite acceptable.
You need to quantify that. My experience has been the opposite. But I don’t have verified data. Anyone can say Linux is better just to say it sans any evidence. The article posted was one of many. Many of these articles are like those that say Linux allows a laptop to run cooler/longer. My experience running Windows 11 on my laptop the battery lasted close to 6 hours (call it 5 hours 30 minutes), on Linux it was just over 4 hours (call it 4 hours and 30 minutes). That is why I keep Windows 11 on it. Maybe Zorin runs better but generally speaking, the consensus on many forums and Linux articles is that Linux does not manage power as efficiently as Windows. The Mintcast podcast mentioned that several weeks back
My M1 beets Linux and Windows by miles in efficiency and performance but that’s ARM architecture. Asahi Linux is making good inroads to that but even many reviewers recognize that Ashai Linux is not as efficient as MacOS.
Anyway, if you like it and you believe it is more efficient, by all means use it. I use Zorin and Mint’s LMDE on my desktop but it is more a hobby. If I need something serious done, it is Windows or Apple. But, I have been using Linux for important tasks too lately so yes it is ready for prime-time but for those people that know how to install the OS. Regular people don’t want that hassle.
Sorry if initial post was poorly worded, what I meant was that I'm seeing much longer battery life on Zorin compared to windows AND lower CPU usage/cooler running on zorin
