As I said in previous post, I use laptop. Laptop has battery which drains, but not so quickly in Windows. In Mint it drains faster, even though the background OS task is lesser. After a quick research, turns out that hardware manufacturer only optimize their hardware in Windows. They’re not enabling all optimization on Linux, but you can manually enable them using config file. Today I will show you what I did to enable those hidden config to saves battery, also some packages that I install, such as TLP.

Battery really drains quickly on Linux Mint. I try a different distros, like the main Ubuntu and it is absolutely worse. On KDE neon it’s better, but I don’t want to use it because it still based on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal, not the newest 22.04 Jammy. Also for some reason neon hangs a lot, and glitches a lot especially on X11 session.

TLP

After some quick research, I found out that installing TLP will help a little bit. It’s already in the repos, but if you’re still using old Debian/Ubuntu, it is better to add the PPA from the developer:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw /y
sudo tlp start

Paste that command, and you may start to see lesser battery consumption. For me, it doesn’t make much difference, so I need to tweak them. Tweaking with configuration file make me confused, so I use TLP-UI which make all the option are toggleable via graphics interface.

Intel RC6 & Framebuffer compression

For those of you who use Intel as their processor, I have a solution that worked for my Celeron (11th gen Jasper Lake). Using intel RC6 as a kernel parameter would add battery life, + improving overall system performance on doing general tasks. Using Framebuffer would reduce 0.5-1W amount of watt usages by enabling framebuffer compression. Anyway add the kernel parameter like this in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="...i915_enable_rc6=1 i915_enable_fbc=1"

Remember if you have another kernel parameter (like quiet splash) don’t forget to put it back before this parameter. Please try to measure the batteyr usages before & after putting the framebuffer parameter. If it drains your battery much more, remove it from kernel parameter.

Disable quick splash

Boot in Linux isn’t ugly anymore with the help of splash. quiet command makes the logs message at boot disappear, so you’ll be presented with a nice loading throbber when booting. But, in my experiences (again, on Celeron with SSD) it slows down boot up to 3 secs, so i deleted that bit of kernel parameter from /etc/default/grub.

Disable Bluetooth on startup

By default bluetooth will be turned out when you boot everytime. But, it consumes a lot of power. In Linux Mint you can disable it by going to Menu > Startup Applications. Press the + button on bottom toolbar and make it like this image:

That’s it for today’s post. I hope some of these suggestions will make your laptop runs way more cooler and more power efficient.