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

2 evertedsphere 1 7/13/2025, 10:40:33 PM

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 (1)

IronWolve · 6h ago

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

Running a VM will probably give you better life.

M.C. Escher – Adventures in Perception [video] (archive.org)

Ten Days of Silence – Vipassana (shahvirsarkary.substack.com)

ASK HN: Why Google's Gemini 2.5 paper has 3295 authors? (arxiv.org)

Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly (refine.sh)

An Impossible Blueprint for a Symbiotic Truth Engine

- (thetimes.com)

Meta Acquires Voice AI Startup PlayAI, Continuing to Add Talent (bloomberg.com)

Open Architecture designs conical Sun Tower as "giant sundial" (dezeen.com)

Bill Dilworth, Caretaker of 'The New York Earth Room,' Is Dead (nytimes.com)

Claude Neptune – AI-Powered Development Platform (claudeneptune.online)

Hards Things First (subbu.org)

Still copy-pasting from Notepad every time?

Silicon Valley is racing to build the first $1T unicorn (economist.com)

Filesystems and the problems of exposing their internal features (utcc.utoronto.ca)

WHDLoad, the AmigaOS friendly Harddisk-Install package (whdload.de)

Nia: MCP that provides more context to coding agents (trynia.ai)

Show HN: Urban Dictionary for Alignment Science Terms (alignmentdictionary.com)

How the Cold War Culture of Anti-Communism Shaped Protest in the Sixties (jofreeman.com)

Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer" (ghuntley.com)

Create custom Manuals uxing Tuxcards and Base64 (erstaunlichdesign.blogspot.com)

PseudoSeer: Pseudocode Search Engine (pseudoseer.ist.psu.edu)

Understanding Assembly Part I: RISC-V (mcyoung.xyz)

Myanmar’s proliferating scam centers (asia.nikkei.com)

In Air India's wake, revisiting the case for cockpit video recorders (theaircurrent.com)

Jack Dorsey says his 'secure' new Bitchat app has not been tested for security (techcrunch.com)

Security vulnerability on U.S. trains – known for 13 years (tomshardware.com)

Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help (techxplore.com)

OpenAI's "Archive" Button in ChatGPT Still Eats Conversations No Way to Recover

The ongoing story of seconds on the taskbar (devblogs.microsoft.com)

Finding a Job: Build Something Real (blog.stuartspence.ca)

3 Men Battle the FBI over Buried Civil War Gold. 'Stuff Just Doesn't Add Up.' (wsj.com)

Show HN: PlutoFilter- A single-header, zero-allocation image filter library in C (github.com)

Errors on Fsync Are Unrecovarable (danluu.com)

Show HN: I made a list of free stuff for college founders (buildincollege.com)

On-device AI link previews in Firefox (blog.mozilla.org)

Can an AI model predict perfectly and still have a terrible world model? (twitter.com)

Why Hoon? (docs.urbit.org)

Moss Medicines: The Next Revolution in Biotech? (the-scientist.com)

Scientists hiding AI text prompts in academic papers to receive positive reviews (theguardian.com)

Essential C# MCP Workshop: Empowering AI Agents by Medhat Elmasry [video] (youtube.com)

New Navy Device Learns by Doing (1958) (nytimes.com)

Elon Musk did not found Tesla (nerds.xyz)

Why is the Federal Reserve independent, and what does that mean in practice? (brookings.edu)

Land Your Dream Job with Confidence (careertrackr.io)

Getting Started with Vector Search [pdf] (media.pragprog.com)

AI Video API (cqtai.com)

IDF blames 'technical error' after children collecting water killed in strike (news.sky.com)

Bayeux Tapestry Will Return to the U.K. In 950 Years (news.artnet.com)

A guide on reading PostgreSQL query plans (prateekcodes.dev)

Thinking First, AI Second (deborahwrites.com)

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

Comments (1)