A few choice quotes from ubuntu reviews
Battery life was not good. It’s between two to three hours depending on what you are doing…. you will last at least for one movie.
Yay! One whole movie!
The laptop comes with a 6 cell battery by default which lasts around 2.5 hours under general use…
That’s right, general use, they weren’t even watching a movie.
The previous release, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat gets over two hours more battery life than Natty Narwhal…
Progress!
Now that I’ve been using my Starling for a while, I can say that the battery is generally good for 3½ to 4 hours.
And that was a review for a netbook, devices that often get over 6hrs battery life.
People often ask me what is stopping ubuntu (and therefore linux) from becoming mainstream, and it comes down to this.
They don’t take themselves seriously.
Sure they talk seriously, but they don’t act it, a regression was introduced in the kernel that almost halves battery life. Was it fixed? No. Did they(Canonical) ship the kernel with the final release? You betcha.
Not only has the regression not been addressed, but less than a month before the release of 11.10 it has gotten worse.
P.S. Some people would note that some of these laptops were high powered and therefore don’t get a long battery life. I’d point them to apple, whose 17″ core i7 laptop still gets 7hrs of use.
crowleysimon 