I've seen some people here that are new to Linux complain about their devices getting hot and loud and having piss poor battery life. This is because it has really rough hardware optimization out of the box. GNU/Linux and other Linux based operating systems are for the most part a hobbyist effort, so they can't keep up with every single little piece of hardware out there and have perfect defaults.
So on any average distro (Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc) you can install a tool called powertop. It's a really simple and easy tool that lets you adjust some settings to give you much better temps and battery life.
>so how do I get this tool? If it's not installed already, just search for it and install it through your package manager. You can open up a GUI frontend for dnf or apt or whatever or do it with the command line. For Debian based distros you can use 'sudo apt search powertop' and then install it with 'sudo apt install powertop' or the name of the exact package.
>how do I use the tool? Open up a terminal emulator. Gain superuser access by typing 'su' and the root password or 'sudo su' and your administrative password. Then you type 'powertop' and it'll launch the tool. Use Ctrl+Tab to switch between the tabs until you get to the last one called "Tunables" and then use the arrow keys to navigate up and down. Hit enter to switch it to say "Good" instead of "Bad" and then you're good to go. One you've tuned the things you want tuned, you hit Escape and close the terminal window.
You can download a package called tlp for nearly all linux distros, some it comes stock, and then enable it with 'systemctl enable tlp' to basically default most of the tunables in powertop to their best values and get you some extra power saving from other stuff.
Why would I need to use thermald when I have both powertop and tlp?
Jaxson Baker
OP here. Installing TLP made my shit all buggy and my mouse wouldn't work. It's much better to edit this stuff manually, just from my experiences. If TLP works for you, go ahead and use it. It just doesn't work well for me.
As you can see in the OP picture, I left the mouse value alone.
Julian Adams
In most cases tlp has worked wonders without having to config anything. HP 8770w Thinkpad T530 X220 T61p And a Toughbook
Wouldn't recommend power saving on anything stationary but if it has a battery: Go for it.
>Does TLP conflict with other power management tools like laptop-mode-tools etc.?
>Yes. Using another tool simultaneously means that TLP's settings get overwritten by the other tools settings (and vice versa), so actual power saving gets unpredictable.
>thermald: thermald's purpose is to limit power dissipation before the laptop's temperature gets critical. TLP enables power saving features globally to optimize battery power especially in idle and low workload situations. TLP does not conflict with thermald.
>Does Powertop achieve better power saving than TLP?
>No. TLP's default configuration is based on the same policy as powertop's recommendations. Refer to the following sections for details and exceptions.
>Does Powertop conflict with TLP?
>Powertop in interactive mode has no impact on TLP's function.
>Explanation: powertop isn't a power management tool but merely an analysis tool. You can use powertop to view estimates about your power usage before or after installation of TLP, but TLP determines the best defaults for your system regardless of whether or not powertop is installed. On the other hand, attempting to apply powertop's --auto-tune settings on each boot will conflict with TLP. Why does Powertop suggest more power saving settings with TLP already running?
>Important: TLP applies maximum power savings on battery power only, so unplug AC power before checking with powertop.
>Not all suggestions from Powertop make sense or are safe to implement:
Austin Lopez
I'm using a heavily customized ThinkPad T400. There are many possible reasons for TLP not working. It could be anything from Libreboot to all of the non-standard parts I have jammed into this thing. I'll probably never know because I don't really care about figuring it out.
Yeah, I'm not sure how many blobs for power management related stuff were left out. I know that BIOS level power management for Coreboot in general is pretty shitty from dealing with that on my X230.
But using OS level tools like powertop can still give me insane battery life on the X230 and good battery life on the T400. For the T400 I refurbished my battery with 3200mAh vape cells. They're pretty high quality ($15 a piece) and I bought 9 of them. I can get around a full day of web browsing out of the T400 with low brightness. The X230 however has a similar 9 cell custom battery that uses 3400mAh cells and can do about 2.5 days for those same tasks.
Chromebooks and MacBooks are a complete joke if you're autistic enough to re-cell your own batteries and play with power management tools in Linux.
Ayden Fisher
To state the obvious, this guy is trolling and removing root is not a good idea.
Is there a good tool for optimizing for your hardware? Eg. I have resolution/monitor issues on my laptop, is there an easy mode to get that fixed?
Anthony Nelson
Why any debian rubbish shits itself after 2-3 month of usage (i.e. ~$ sudo apt update Reading package lists... Done E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable) E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
Daniel Miller
sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
Gavin Hughes
What kinds of issues? You'll need to be more specific.
You can use xrandr through the command line if it's totally unusable. Otherwise just use the settings app from your desktop environment. If you're just using a window manager then use xrandr.
>Did you try Googling not him but yeah there is a super easy fix on deb just clean the apt cache
Jackson Rogers
>Did you try Googling your issue? No, i've switched to suse since it just works >do nuffing >shits itself
Jaxon Lopez
Instead of making a thread about this very specific topic, you should have posted in
Angel Rogers
It's one Google search away.
See No.
Josiah Gomez
>GNU/Linux and other Linux based operating systems are for the most part a hobbyist effort, so they can't keep up with every single little piece of hardware out there and have perfect defaults. Linux users will deny/defend this.
