Poor Battery Life on KDE

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

So, I’ve noticed that my laptop’s battery life on Endeavour OS KDE is ridiculously bad, even while using energy saving mode on power-profiles-daemon.

All I can get a measly 1 hour and 30 minutes when web browsing, while others report being able to run this same laptop for 3 hours on similar tasks. I’m beginning to think that there is some kind of configuration that I’m maybe missing.

To clarify I’m running an Intel i5 12th Gen and a RTX 3050 and I’ve already tried using TLP to no avail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and if you guys need any output I can gladly send them.

2

Did you try ‘powertop’ (intel-tool) - in extra repo? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Powertop

Maybe it can give you some hints.

I’m running an ASUS Notebook (i5, no extra GPU) & XFCE, lasts for about 6hrs or more…

3

Brand MSI ?

My notebook lost 15% in the first 6 months. I own my notebook for over 2 and half years. Capacity is now 75% and i keep it always plugged. MSI has shi.ty batteries for sure and dont give any warranty on it (already tried).

4

You know, you can load your battery to death?

For this reason some people made the TLP-tools, then the bat stops loading at 80% or whatever you have adjusted. Did’nt try that for now.

5

I am using notebooks since 2009, never killed one. Even if my battery dies i don’t care about it. I always keep it plugged.

6

careful that you dont end like me that while charging and doing gpu intensive work the battery discharges :skull: it aint fun

1 Like
7

Did it explode?

8

no, its fine. just discharging while charging. its weak because i had it always plugged in

1 Like
9

Check if Hardware acceleration or GPU is being used or not. For that you will need nvidia linux firmware installed.

If you are using Firefox go to Settings > Help > More Troubleshooting information. There look for
WebGL 1 Driver Renderer
WebGL 2 Driver Renderer
GPU #1 - This should Active Yes and with the description. If not then you are not using GPU
Decision Log - Look for HW_COMPOSITING and HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING.

If you have MPV, play a video file (MP4/AVI/etc) and press i. Check for the key Video and what does it say. Does it have HW which has VDPAU or NVDEC or NVENC, if not then you are not using GPU.

Since you are using NVidia graphics card, RTX 3050 ideally you should be using VDPAU or NVDEC or NVENC. If you are not then that will drain battery very fast as CPU will have to do all the graphics work.

10

I second this, try running powertop to get an idea on what is draining your battery. In the “device stats” tab you can see actual usages and the amount of energy consumed.

11

My first advice for every new user that has installed EndeavourOS on a Laptop would be:
Check the Arch Wiki Laptop article and check for make & model to identify potentially known solutions.
If you can’t find an entry for the specific make & model, searching the github repos can potentially worth a shot, as some linux aficionados share at least some gist for their mobile workstations.

Laptops can be flaky at times, even reputable brands.
With an dGPU such as a rtx 3050, for energy savings I would definitely deactivate the dGPU and use the iGPU instead which your Laptop CPU should have (unless they really made 12 Gen CPUs with the F suffix, e.g. no integrated graphics card at all in Intels mobile lineup of CPUs).

Battery health, current status and load capacity should be easily accessible via upower [extra] and acpi also in the [extra] repository.

Last but not least, tools like powertop can identify specific, power hungry background processes. Also in the [extra] repo and is also suitable to diagnose non-mobile systems. Just check the Arch wiki entry about it. You’ld have to calibrate it in a first run. It will provide specific tunable settings, based on your systems hardware and flag those which could/should be changed (e.g. wireless & bluetooth power saving modes, usb autosuspend).

Edit: Too late, should have read the whole thread first, didn’t realized that powertop has already been mentioned…

12

I did run powertop, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the stats it gave me. If you can help me interpret them that would great :slight_smile:

13

On Firefox it says that harware acceleration is being used, although only for the igpu and not the nvidia one. Does that drain more battery? If so, how can I switch to nvidia?

14

I’ve run both upower –monitor and acpi using the dmesg | grep -i acpi command as stated in the Arch wiki, but I’m not sure of what exactly I’m looking for here.

I’m sorry for asking too many questions, I’m still new to this linux battery optimization thing.

15

man powertop, read this.

In the 1st screen of powertop (overview) you see the most power-consuming tasks at top.

Here you should begin and check, who is playing havoc…

On the 5th screen (tunables) you will see your Hardware-components and their tuning state.

This may be adjusted in powertop.

Additional: top is a tool to show the pure cpu-consumption, more simple…

16

No need to be sorry at all. There is only one kind of question which is inadequate. And that is the question not asked in the first place / which isn’t spoken out loudly.

But it can be really helpful if you share the output of inxi -Fxxc0z | eos-sendlog, executed in the bash of your terminal (further details about it here) as we could take a look on your hardware specifications, identifying your laptops make and model.

Concerning powertop, the most important stuff are the tuneables which are either classified as good or bad. And you would be able to toggle these changes directly within powertop. E.g. autosuspend of a usb device such as a wireless mouse. Which should be reviewed, as some wireless devices won’t wake up properly again, thus you’ld be better of using a power mode that’s flagged as bad for seamless operation.

17

Thank you very much for the kind words! As for the output of the command you’ve sent, here it is:

https://0x0.st/87T7.txt

I looked at the tunables on powertop and there are quite a few things listed as “Bad”, now I just need to check how to tune things manually to avoid having these problems with usb devices.

18 
275,4 µs/s      46,8        Timer          inactive_task_timer
401,4 µs/s     152,5        Interrupt      [40] idma64.1 
348,0 µs/s      13,6        Process        [PID 19] [rcu_preempt] 
521,8 µs/s       6,8        kWork          intel_atomic_cleanup_work
283,4 µs/s       8,0        Process        [PID 1281] /usr/lib/org_kde_powerdevil

These seem to be the tasks that are consuming the most amount of battery from my understanding.

19

Check out https://github.com/johnfanv2/LenovoLegionLinux, according to this pull request on github, your laptop is supported. It’s available via the AUR, links are available in the readme on github. But beware that it is a reverse-engineered inofficial software.

There are two versions, the one with dkms and another one without, which should work just as fine. Only the dkms version is flagged as outdated currently with some notes that it seem only to work in case CachyOS is used.

In both cases, those are pure -git versions. I.e. the package would be compiled locally on your machine. There is also a list of required packages within the instructions of the github page which should be required, but aren’t included in the AURs package as a dependency by the package maintainer (as it actually should be).

Additionally, according to lenovos support site, there is a newer BIOS version available, which is recommended, released as of today. Thus you may consider to update that as well.

20

I think it would be helpful to show the whole page. Just compared it with mine, but no kde here…

If it is not clear to see, you should tell us what is just running or all idle…

And check, please, if the samples keep the same or change heavily - then we should watch that.

Besides that: go to the tunables page and try to set all ‘bad’ things to ‘good’ state and compare the power-consumption on the 1st page. Check your mouse or whatever you have on usb will keep working…

Sometimes the ‘good’ settings will block something.