I think power saving on linux laptops is something of a rabbit hole. Before I dive down the rabbit hole, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions that can save me some time on research.
SO what I would like to solve is battery time on my laptop, and looking for it to perform as well as possible.
The laptop also gets a little warm from time to time. But here I think I have to look at CPU frequency scaling and fan speed.
I have approx. 4-6 hours of battery time on my laptop depending on what I use it for.
Iām a little unsure about what I should use for power saving.
What I, among other things, would like to achieve is that my laptop automatically goes into suspend if no buttons have been pressed for more than 15 min, unless Iām watching a video.
If possible, I would also like to set my laptop to automatic hypernet if there is 5% battery left.
How should I approach this?
Powertop? Laptop Mode Tools, manual configuration or something else entirely?
Maybe there is a power saving profile that comes with one of the other EOS spins I could use?
As I write, itās a bit of a rabbit hole. Where should I start?
Should I start with powertop, Laptop Mode Tools or powersaving profile from another EOS spin?
I really want to avoid scripting the hell out of my laptop.
dependeing on when you have installed EndeavourOS you will have power-profiles-daemon running already, and it should do a good job on intel CPUs.
systemctl status power-profiles-daemon will tell if it is running
It has 3 profiles you can set from settings on GNOME and from command line too or use this:
I find this to be of some interest in terms of being fully charged yet at only 38Wh out of 51Wh. Does your battery generally perform well, or might it be getting a bit old - perhaps suggesting itās time for a replacement?
EDIT: Upon further research, itās unlikely youāve got an aging battery given the recent production of these Dell laptops. Sorry if I unduly alarmed you!
Ok, thanks.
Iāll try it and see how it works. And really cool with small applications that can do small things.
I think it is too excessive if everything has to be done through a terminal, or a script that is tied to a keybinding or something like that.
yes need sto be easy to switch I have set this on the panel for i3 setupā¦ but there is no such tool for most DEās so idea was to have something generically working ā¦
But as I do not have intel CPU and do not use ppd here I can not really test the app
It works fine. Itās super minimal and it does exactly what itās supposed to do.
I use dwm. And the text in floating mode, was very close to each other. I made it a little bigger than the size it pops up in as default. And it was absolutely perfect. I donāt know if itās because Iām using a wm and not a DE since the text was very close together.
I think that many of those who use a DE would like it if there were some graphics that showed some kind of performance graph.
In the meantime, thanks to your script, I figured out how to use the power profile settings.
It calls powerprofilesctl. I really should find out what is in my bin folder and what they belong to.
Do you have any dot files where I can see how you have set it up in your i3 panel?
I use dwm and dwmblocks as a status bar. I use dmenu to call different applications. It could be cool if it could be integrated into my status bar, like e.g. nm-applet. But I should be able to make a script that shows info about what power saving mode it is in and a clickeble script to switch modes.
When i open ppd-switcher, at the top it says what the current profile is.
But the drop down menu is always on Balanced. Itās confusing because itās the first thing you notice when you open ppd-switcher.
It will make it less confusing if it was not on Balanced as default, but e.g. something like choose a profile, or something like that.
yes i see the same but as it is a very simple yad GUI there are not much options ā¦ i will check about this ā¦ may @manuel knows something he is the yad king
I forgot to mention that I think this power-profiles-daemon, It works fine. It sets my cpu speed down or up depending on what profile I choose.
But there is still not much battery time left.
I donāt think there is much more that can be done. Other than perhaps somehow setting it up to suspend if no buttons are pressed, and a screen saver and a screen locker.
I know how to set up the latter, but I donāt know how to set timers for suspend and hibernate, and how to make a rule so that it doesnāt start to go into suspend or hibernate while Iām watching a video.
it is a known issue that linux is sucking more energy as machines are only optimized for using windows ā¦ not like on server hardware ā¦
And yes setting up sleep suspend hibernate is a good option.
I do use close lid ā suspend on my notebook as I do not use it very often it is mainly my internet portal in the kitchen ā¦ so I simpĆ¼ly close it and it suspends to wake up fast when I need itā¦
ppd has only profiles and nothing to fine-tune power consumptionā¦ it will not power down wifi as far as I knowā¦ some devices do this per default but wifi and display are the two things using a lot of powerā¦
