Good battery saving apps for linux

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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hey im currently running ubuntu gnome LTS version and im wondering on whats a good app or tool to help increase battery life?

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powertop - it shows you what is using the energy and suggests optimisations (they are not persistent though)

sudo apt-get install powertop

tlp - Its configurable and applies powersavings when on battery but disables them when on wallpower.

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw smartmontools ethtool

For setting up tlp that 2nd post on the askubuntu.com forum is a great source.
Original manual: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html

2 Likes
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cheers ill see how long it lasts now after ive charged it up fingers crossed it works :D

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Check with powertop if tlp applied the power savings successful. If some options are missing, powertop does show you what it did.. so you could manually add them.

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You can even use powertop to put devices in powersaving mode under the tunables tab, or by appending

$ sudo powertop --auto-tune

in the terminal if a powersaving daemon like TLP doesn't make those changes automatically. TLP is a great program, the config file itself is well documented so make sure to read through it and check that all settings are fine.
Another program similar to TLP is laptop-mode-tools, got it installed after TLP couldn't control my battery levels anymore for some reason (I want the battery to start charging when it gets below 70% and stop charging when it hits 85%).

Also, here's a good intro to powertop: