Notebook battery optimization: What tool do you recommend and why?

General system Applications
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Most distros (incl. EOS) nowadays come with the power-profiles-daemon preinstalled. But we also have, to name the most prominent, tlp and tlp-rdw as well as auto-cpufreq.

I’m pretty okay with the power-profiles-daemon so far, because I can decide (even on battery) what to use: powersaving, balanced or performance.

tlp basically has only two modes: AC and battery and can do more things, like disable WiFi, USB, etc. When I’m out, I typically disable WiFi (often also Bluetooth), but I might want to use them, like for tethering using my smartphone, or listening with earbuds.

auto-cpufreq is said to “let the kernel do the heavy lifting”, whatever that means (never tried it). Probably just sets kernel/CPU governor settings?

Let’s take a few typical situations for my netbooks:

  • writing outdoors (high display brightness, no WiFi, no BT)
  • writing & research indoors (low brightness, WiFi & BT enabled, a little YouTube)
  • hours of media consumption in bed, on vacation or in hotel (low to medium brightness, WiFi & BT on, massive YouTube, Jellyfin & Hypnotix)
  • EOS updates, software installs requiring compilations (CPU power needed on low-end notebook; these are maybe once a day or two, and could possibly be postponed until AC is available)
  • No gaming at all.

Anyone got experience with a setup like this? The goal is to get longest battery endurance without sacrificing too much.

  • Which power management software would you recommend for this case? (No AI answers or theories please, but from actual experience.)
  • And why?
  • This is quite a general question, but in case it matters: I use EOS with Cinnamon and X11.

Thanks!

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Hmm. Really nobody using their notebook or laptop on battery?

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I don’t use a laptop on battery, but back when I did I used whatever the distro came with because I figure the creators know more about it than I do. If it didn’t come with a power management tool, I used tlp.

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I´m using an Acer B-1 (very poor) and now an Asus-B1400, on Bat & AC,

TLP I didn´t know so far, found it just here…

I I think, TLP brings a great benefit, if running most on AC, to prevent bat loading to death.

My setup is & has been ´out of the box´, only using the powertop-unit at startup.

DE is XFCE and powertop says, there is juice for 6 1/2 hrs when 95%.

P.S. If your media consumption is video at most, you should have a look for GPU-HW decoding, in case your machine can do so. Here this saves some Wh.

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Very rarely. Smartphone does pretty much everything the netbook does.

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Hi Moonbase,

On my Thinkpad’s I’ve tried several approaches to try to save power (Powertop, TLP and auto-cpufreq) and to be honest I often get mixed results for battery usage. The applications and services on the system seem to be what you should target to try to save on battery usage.

That being said, I ended up changing my power profile to tuneD so I could have a system with more flexibility. Most of the time my laptops are docked now (25% of the time I will undock when I am writing outside of my home office.

At the moment I am just holding on to my equipment and put up with the battery (e.g T450 has 2 batteries installed). But ultimately I will need to move to some kind of M1+ Macbook if something is fully developed for that system.

Thanks for posting your thoughtful question.

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This is a really important aspect.

I´m watching my machine for some days now in powertop (since the discussion in another thread) and found some really surprising things. Lazy as I am, many open things idle around - bah, NOT idle! Here I have the AC plug not so far away, so I can give it a shot if needed, but if it does matter - close everything not needed actually…

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The other item I am on the fence about is tuning the systems responsiveness. I recent changed my scheduler (SCX Scheduler) to change the systems responsiveness of my daily driver. This might be considered a tuning consideration which I was reading about at CachyOS.

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Oh, oh, don´t let it hear the eos-god´s :wink: Have just been there, to look for a live-sys…

If I take the hits at distrowatch, I can imagine, why the Arch-servers go up & down.:smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

But - for now I´m missing nothing in eos on my notebook.

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CachyOS is interesting. I read through their documentation\wiki for ideas. The only thing that have me move away from EOS is if a really good Linux Macbook install came out. So for now old hardware and maybe CosmicOS next year if they get to a release candidate.

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OK, but thats far away from my roadmap. I dislike A* for long time. Their HW may be very good, but for that price…

Arch / EOS is my ´bleeding edge´, and I think it´s enough. To serve my nostalgic sense, some days ago installed Debian-Trixie, too.

Have no games, video or other powerplay.

P.S. We shouldn´t hijack Moonbase59´s thread - sorry.

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