So, I’m using firefox and I’m starting to not like the battery life. I’ve got this distro on a linux t2 mac, the macbook pro 2019 13 inch, to be precise. Macbooks are supposed to have hella battery life, and yet I have not seen a speck of that (I get like 3-4 hours just doing chromebook tasks). I plan on going to something like opera or ungoogled chromium, but what do you guys think?
Two things:
- I think you should check your power management settings instead of your browser
- Nobody should use Opera, ever
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I really doubt power consumption will go significantly up or down if you choose another browser. It’s what you do inside the browser that dictates the power consumption.
Maybe you aren’t using hardware acceleration?
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I would check the battery out properly than if it is in good health check out BIOS’UEFI settings and what sort of power managment you have sett up
Have you searched for the battery life of your model in general?
For an Intel Macbook 4 hours of activity doesn’t sound THAT unreasonable.
You should absolutely never trust the marketing numbers, search and compare with actual users’ usage numbers.
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I always recommend Brave browser, you can compile it automatically using the .bin on yay. It doesn’t load ads so there must be some power saving in that given how resource greedy ads are these days.
You can set your power mode in the power settings gui.
You can also strip out some of the power intensive settings via the bios.
You can also enable power efficient settings in the bios such as APSM and some light under locking.
In OS, you can use gamemoderun to get performance on demand from a low power config.
I know there is also a bunch of tweaks to be done in the OS as I’ve looked briefly in to them but I’m currently working towards a stable system before chasing the low power idea, so not clued enough to suggest them.
Also, as with phones, one of your biggest power drains using a battery will be your screen.
Generally a darker theming will give you some power save functionality, but unless it’s a Oled device, this will be negligible.
Good cooling saves power!
If your dusty in your heatsinks and exhaust ports you’ll get thermal throttled,
And become power inefficient.
Power saving can be a large project given the many areas you can tweak to save a little juice, here and there.
I would say the first issue to solve here is wether it is the system or the programs failing in how the user expects it to results
Nobody should use Opera, ever
Hi @dalto ,
I have used it in the past, but currently I’m sticked to Firefox. But why did you say that?
We often refer to big tech companies as “shady” because they do things we don’t like with our data or do things that would otherwise make them untrustworthy.
However, none of those things compare to the level that the company who owns and controls Opera is shady. Their behavior is openly exploitive and in many cases clearly illegal.
They were caught exploiting people with misleading short-term loans. The APR’s on these loans were in the range of 400% but would scale up to 700%+ if you were late.
Their basic excuse when they were caught is that these people could not qualify for loans any other way due to their low income and/or other demographics factors.
Reference: https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnaround/
There are plenty of other reasons, but that one is the most glaring.
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Understood.
Well, I used Opera many years ago, sincerely don’t know nothing about their current state.
It’s very good to know more about. Thank you so much, as well as for the reference: I’ll certainly read it in a few minutes.
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Nah, I got hardware accel up
Opera was sold in 2016. Everything went downhill after that.
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I can imagine. Very sad. 
Back in the day, visiting internet shops and using internet explorer, my first major improvements came with using Firefox and Opera.
Opera had those amazing mouse shortcuts - and could be run as a portable app from USB>
But then Opera was bought out by a very shady Chinese company and (with good reason IMO) all the developers quit their jobs and set up Vivaldi.
Let me ask you, if Microsoft were to somehow buy out EndeavourOS, would you continue to use it?
Opera was never the top choice on Linux, because it never went open source - but I stick by what I said, up until it was sold I had great experiences with it.
I know that Brave is popular for being safer than Chrome, but personally I haven’t any issues with Firefox - if it dies, then we’re in deep shit. The main issue for me with Brave is that it’s still reliant on Google’s development input.
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Are you using power-profiles-daemon or one of the other similar tools like auto-cpufreq or tlp? These allow you to tune your CPU when on battery to maximize the battery.
Caveat: they may not work on Mac’s, not sure.
Tip: don’t mix-match these at the same time. They can compete, which doesn’t help.