Zoom is a shockingly CPU consuming program. I know people have to use it, that’s been the case for me too, but it was easier to make sure I had a plug handy when using Zoom than trying to make it run well.

I think a review that use based around Zoom battery life is about as useful as one based around short circuiting the battery terminals.

Teams hogs power as well. I get about 4h on my 16” MBP M1 Pro. When in a teams call it also significantly impact single core benchmark results of the app I’m working on.

So maybe power drain is inherent in conferencing tooling? Is teams even utilising the hardware decode/encoding paths? When in a call Teams consistently consumes a full single core.

While videoconferencing does take some resources, the fact of the matter is both zoom and teams are poorly written web apps packaged into “desktop applications” and that’s where most of the utilization is coming from

I do wonder whether these apps are using any of the hardware acceleration available in our hardware. These days PCs are second class to mobile phones.

Poor coding criticisms apply to almost every massively popular software. At this point it almost seems like a requirement to make it not too fast as to reduce user frustration and mental share by proxy.

IMO a more likely story is that companies that take time to write programs well get beat by their shovelware competition.

But popular apps continue to be sluggish even after they had scaled. If faster apps made more, the first enhancement would be speed improvements.

Yeah, I wonder about this.

I don’t know Teams, but Zoom has to do some image processing (it has some face cleanup tech which is weird because everybody knows a programmer’s power-level is directly correlated to how disheveled and tired they look), and also some audio filtering (need to filter out keyboards).

But, I mean, Discord manages to do the latter for pretty cheap, and the former is stupid optional vanity stuff anyway.

The conclusion I come to is that Zoom is a badly written program that would never have seen the light of day if we weren’t suddenly launched into WFH around 2020. That program is like the third worst thing that happened that year.

I have an old X201 with OpenBSD. My setup on that machine is deliberately "gimped" with all ads and most JS blocked to make webpages load acceptably fast, and with the `apmd` enabled and hw.setperf at 10-20.

With a 3rd party 9-cell battery, I can easily get 4.5-5 hours runtime like this. I think the biggest power draw at this point is the display, since it's an older and less energy efficient panel.

Granted, most of my usage is either SSH'ing into another machine or X11 forwarding apps from another machine. I think with hw.setperf dialed up, SMT enabled, and the blockers turned off I'd be lucky to get 45 minutes of runtime...

Either way, not bad for a "museum" computer :)

I've switched to Alpine Linux for anything with a battery. OpenBSD ran very well on my X220, X230, and T430 but there's a 2-3 hour difference in battery life during normal usage that's hard to pass up.

If you've never played around with Alpine, check it out! You'll find the installer... very familiar!

X201 i5? I installed OpenBSD latest on mine and was impressed by the battery life contre toute attente. Fvwm with some essential tray apps and we're good! If Jupyter Lab ran on this setup, I'd be a total convert. In terms of hardware, I installed coreboot and replaced the wlan with something modern from China. I plan to upgrade from 2 GB to 8 GB but hard to find compatible SO-DIMM these days. It would be bloody awesome to upgrade the display to FHD but that looks... complicated, we'll see. But I love working with an OS where I understand everything.

Very nice! It's impressive how much can be squeezed out of these Thinkpads. I daily drove an X230 until earlier this year, it's only a bit faster than the X201 and I basically used it in the same capacity - a jump box to other machines. The keyboards and form factors of these laptops are top tier though.

Is there an issue with electron apps on BSD?

Why wouldn't there be an issue?

Any electron app will be using a Linux build of the Chromium browser, whether this will run on a BSD variant will depend on how well any Linux emulation layer works, OpenBSD has removed their Linux emulation layer.

Yes, wasn't sure if someone had taken the effort to port over Chromium. Thanks for the info.