In one of level1techs video, wendel said he made some power adjustment patch for zen 5 laptop (i believe) which netted him some efficiency/battery life gains.
I couldn’t find it anywhere, my doubt is will it work for intel based laptops(maybe not every settings but some?). And also where can i find it?.
For context: I’m mostly a windows user who dual boots linux(opensuse tumbleweed btw). One of the things i miss in linux is Throttlestop. I previously had a 7th gen intel laptop with a dgpu, speed step wasnt enabled by default but throttle stop enabled it and I got a 20-40 mins battery uplift. I couldn’t find a similar gui app for linux.
I bought a new laptop a few days ago, Huawei D16 (Intel i5-13420h,16gb,57wh battery). Before commenting spyware, i got it for cheap and dont care about it. Also it comes with windows and my plan is to completely wipe and run linux full time. (Funny thing is Huawei is banned from using android and other google services but can use windows and ms services?. Also initial windows setup made me create a local account instead of login with a ms account.)
Comment below if you want a review and a few pictures.( But i can only post it next week as laptop is at home and I’m out station for this week).
Anyway, do you have any battery optimization tips and tricks for linux? Any software or guides?
Please share down below and ty in advance.
I researched the topic a bit in the past (actually, I was looking for guides on how to get more battery life out of FreeBSD but in the process of searching, a bunch of resources for Linux came up as well), and the general consensus seems to be to install tlp, and leave it with default settings, which will be optimal for most use cases. Obviously, reading the docs may be beneficial nonetheless.
What kind of battery life do you get at the moment?
I used to swear by tlp but with more recent laptops and distros I don’t notice the difference with/without it installed any more. Somewhere between my 3rd gen sandy bridge and 8th gen kaby lake that is. This is using fedora.
Use powertop for monitoring. See if idle/browsing power use is good. If it is, don’t worry about it. Nowadays defaults are good. Wendell’s experience was probably different since zen 5 is very very recent, and drivers may not be updated yet.
Two tips though:
check if you can have S3 sleep, switch off windows modern standby if battery drain in sleep is high.
on a recent dell laptop I had a lot of battery drain due to the nvme mode being on raid. Switching to ahci gave me a huge improvement. Probably the raid driver only was present in windows.
what is TLP ? Never used. I run FreeBSD on laptop, checking some settings for cpu, screen etc. I have 24 and 74wh batteries so i can last up to 12h with light coding/browsing on UFS , tested on ZFS and had shorter battery life - i dont know maybe its tin foil hat moment or placebo - but for me UFS gave better battery life . Now im re-doing everything again and i will see what is what.
No Throttlestop on Linux, but TLP does wonders for Intel laptops! You can find it in the repos and it has out-of-the-box settings that improve battery life. Look for guides online for further customization. Enjoy your Huawei D16!