[system7rocks]

Interesting.

I've never quite found that Linux is more optimized on battery-powered machines for energy savings, even though supposedly there is a lot of room to tweak and optimize settings -- from selecting a low resource window manager/DE to turning off various services to switching up power management utilities. But this does seem like an approach that might produce that kind of fruit?

[dapperdrake]

Kernel option nohz_full in grub config.

Also disable hardware SMT as a kernel option in grub config. Then the cores can clock down way more often and L1 data cache size doubles.

XFCE and X11 tripled my laptop battery life vs. whatever Wayland+GNOME Ubuntu (2024?) brought by itself.

Powertop and tlp also help.

Happy camping.

EDIT: the lower heat dissipation also halved boot time. That one surpised me the most.

EDIT2: Disable "atime" with ext4 option "noatime". Saves a lot of power, heat, trimming, and re-writes on your SSD/NVMe.

For "faster shutdowns" manually run systemctl start fstrim.service. Not exactly sure why fstrim.timer seems unreliable.

[cogman10]

The really unfortunate thing about linux is the defaults tend to be not battery friendly.

For example, I recently got another 1 hour out of my old laptop's battery because I didn't realize for the intel video card driver I needed to add some modprobe flags to get it to load up a firmware binary blob. Doing that enabled hardware video decoding, faster performance, and lower power usage.

There's a bunch of setting like this that you need to make sure are turned on to get the best battery performance. Some OSes are better about toggling them than others and mine (gentoo) let's you discover later that you forgot to turn them on :).

[tcmart14]

This is where looking at the gaming centric distros and doing what they do makes sense. I haven't seen all kernel settings for all distros, but my understanding is many choose the defaults and most of the defaults are more optimized for server usage. Which makes sense. Debian's biggest deployment environment is a fleet of servers. For the standard Debian Install, of course. However, my laptop is not a server, so the defaults don't make sense. This is where we maybe need distros that their whole niche is to be laptop friendly. Or, get the bigger distros, to offer a flavor with a different set of defaults for laptop environments.

[inigyou]

The beauty of open source is that you can be the change you want to see in the world.

[exe34]

Hey could you tell me about this flag please? I have an intel gpu and might need it too!

[cogman10]

It's the GuC and HuC firmware.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel#GuC.2FHuC_firmware

[exe34]

Thanks! Aha this is for gen 9ish onwards, my GPU is gen 3.

[lproven]

Exactly -- not sure I have many machines new enough for this to apply to.

The machine I'm typing on is the 2nd newest in the fleet -- it's a work box -- and it's an i7-8550U, an 8th gen "Kaby Lake" chip.

[inigyou]

I have a laptop where you need to load a certain driver to turn off the discrete GPU, which triples the idle battery life.

[cogman10]

Yeah, I have this problem. IIRC the last time I looked into it, it requires a specific version of the nVidia driver which isn't the latest version (very unfortunately). I just bit the bullet and went with the 5W of constant consumption rather than figure out how to get that old driver working with my setup.

[fhn]

That's really sad to hear. I think it's just so much to configure for any human to take on. I'm going to run my system config through an LLM and have it optimize it for me see if that works.

[c0balt]

You might want to take a look at TLP[0]. It, among other things, backs the power mode/profile panels in Gnome/KDE.

Many distros already try to push good defaults, but you can do a whole lot when optimizing for a mobile experience. You can also do some fun stuff with it, like running a script[1] when going from ac->bat power to, e.g., turn of a service, lower refresh rate or reduce brightness.

[0]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html [1]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/usage/run-on.html#run-on-ac-run-on-...