Suggestions for a light laptop with long battery life?

[Tom]

I'm also a little concerned about speed, so some low end atom won't work for me that well. I've been looking at a lenovo x220 and thats sort of in the range I'm looking for. But more battery life would be nice even if it means it's a bit slower. some upgradeability would be nice, or if it isn't it needs to have a decent amount of disk space (256GB+) and ram (4-8GB+). I also don't really want to spend over 1k, and I'd prefer 400-800.

linux support is a MUST.

[Lazybones]

The Linux requirement will make your list really short. Dell and Lenovo are stable brands. However look into the current Chrome books. I have seen a few cases where  people have converted them to proper Linux distros.

[Tom]

Yeah, thats why I edited and added that. It's an important thing. I can't imagine having to use windows for any serious length of time :x  though I suppose I could run linux in virtual box or something. but I'd rather not.

[Thorin]

Macs are well-known to be really light on their batteries.  Apparently Mac OSX has been written with thoughts towards battery life (less polling, less constantly running services).  I read through a comparo article that was showing how Windows 8 uses way less battery power than Windows 7, but Mac OSX destroyed them both (Win7: 3.2 hours, Win8: 4.8 hours, OSX: 7.5 hours).

Of course, no Linux on a Mac.  And they're expensive.

Doesn't the Lenovo x220 allow larger battery packs?

[Tom]

It does, it can use a 6 or 9 cell external battery, as well as a battery slice, and I think ultrabay battery as well. but that just makes it heavier! heh.

[Lazybones]

As Thorin has pointed out Battery life has A LOT to do with the OS and how well it allows equipment to sleep. Linux it self is not well known for its battery saving... In fact when I was looking at several "roll our own NAS" forums they where going on and on about how you can't correctly spin down drives due to various services always probing the disk.

THUS, funding a laptop that has drivers and support for a specific distro is probably best.

[Tom]

Yeah, I do get less battery life on my laptop with linux than I did under windows. probably shorter by a couple hours (I am not counting idle time). I've heard of people running linux under a vm and still get more battery life out of it than stock linux. It's an option, but any light laptop I get will have limited disk space. And many of the fancier ones have upgradeable storage. which sucks horribly.

re: NAS, it's true, and its actually a FS thing I think. ext[234] will occasionally do a flush of the cache, and that'll wake up the disks. You can tune that flush to be several minutes or more, but it still wakes up.

[Lazybones]

I know you have some form of hate for Ubuntu but here would be a good start point, it includes laptops.+
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

I suspect that Debian should work just fine in Ubuntu's place.