Librem 14 Battery Life While Running Qubes OS
Here is a first look at the kind of battery life one might expect while using a Purism Librem 14 as shipped with the 4-cell battery while running a normal workload in Qubes OS.
TL;DR - The Chart
Condtions
Given a steamy day in Texas, one Librem 14 running Qubes OS, and a few general tasks to accomplish I set out to find out how long I might expect to spend away from a wall outlet if I:
- Used WiFi
- Ran most tasks in a DispVM browser or terminal
- Kept the screen at a lower brightness setting
- Ran things until warned I should save and shutdown to avoid data loss
Process
Once the system was running, I started a loop to give me battery stats every 60s:
while true; do
upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0 > $(date +%s)_bat-info.txt
sleep 60
done
From here, I just went about my business. TemplateVMs on my system are primarily based on Fedora. As a result very nearly every boot means there are updates available. Updating was probably the most strenuous task executed during the test run. In fact, I do not recall the fans turning on for anything else throughout the day except for maybe the one time I started one of my more substantial VMs I use for development. For the most part I had at least (7) VMs running, one of which maintained a WireGuard VPN connection to my cloud environment. General tasks amounted to:
- Registering a domain name, and getting it pointed to the right server(s).
- Configuring NGINX to serve responses to that domain.
- Setting up a systemd unit file to run a site for the same domain.
- Accessing my personal machines in Europe and updating them.
- Configuring Split GPG
- Adding one UID to my GPG key.
- Adding my GPG key to Gitea, Gitlab, and Github as well as my
.gitconfig. - Researching a path towards using Split GPG and GPG agent for SSH access
- Some general chatting on Matrix using the Element web app.
Conclusion
This machine lasts at least as long with light use as my previous system. No one runs towards Qubes OS with the hopes of marathon battery life, and I am pretty happy with near 5hrs of battery runtime on WiFi with a persistent VPN to my cloud resources. Next time, I may shut off WiFi and see how much purely local heavy use I can squeeze out before the battery dies.