Laptop Battery Life Extension Strategies

[TwoFistedJustice]

What have you all done to increase the battery run time of your Kubuntu laptops?

[GreyGeek]

Nothing. I treat my laptop as a desktop and its battery like an UPS. It's only purpose was/is to allow me to yank the power strip plug out of the wall if a lightning storm snuck up on me.

IF I were to use my laptop as a laptop here's what I'd do to conserve battery while it is acting as the only source of power:
1) Never play games.
2) Run 18.04 or 20.04 (prefer the 20.04) because Plasma 5.18+ has a very light footprint.
3) Turn the brightness down when just working with text, and don't use screen apps that paint moving pictures during idle times.
4) Use "systemctl stop whatever.service" to stop unnecessary services from running. Things like Conky, desktop widgets like weather, clocks, and other amusements. For example: I use netdata, an EXTENSIVE monitoring system. It takes, on average, about 2-3% of my 8 cores. I can use "systemctl stop netdata.service" to stop it. IF I need it again I can use "systemctl start netdata.service" and then browse to localhost:19999 to see the output.
5) Use various top apps (top, iotop, kerneltop, irqtop, itop, etc...) to see which apps, services, IRQ's are being called the most and then investigate if you can reduce their load or eliminate them.
6) Etc...

IF you need and must run on battery alone then get a second batter (or two) and keep it/them charged. When the first battery is exhausted swap it out for the fresh one.

[claydoh]

Don't run both TLP and Powertop together, as this will actually cause conflicts and maybe even reduce battery usage.

Read the documentation and many how-tos on them to see if one may be better for your device.

Research your particular laptop, as perhaps someone before you has looked at and maybe figured out some specific schemes - Thinkpads have massive Linux usage and communitiies, and some business Dells have good user bases, so in these cases, there may be good info available

Keep screen brightness down, maybe reduce the timeout for screen blanking and suspend.

If it is a hybrid intel/Nvidia system, don't use the Nvidia GPU unless you need it.

Turn off Bluetooth if you don't use it.


Personally, I have done little to increase battery life other than the basics above. Sometimes TLP has helped me, but not not on every laptop. Powertop seems to be less useful on those I have used it on.

[TwoFistedJustice]

Don't run both TLP and Powertop together, as this will actually cause conflicts and maybe even reduce battery usage.

Hmm, I installed TLP and thought maybe I was imagining that my battery life was reduced after that. But now I see that I also have Powertop installed. Co-inky-dink?

[claydoh]

You can have Powertop and TLP installed together, just don't run Powertop with the '--autotune' option

https://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html

[kc1di]

I've used slimbook battery to good effect. I does much of what tlp does but easier to use get it here.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/05/...timizer-ubuntu