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Any suggestions for improving battery life? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml to c/thinkpad@lemmy.ml

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29217325

I've got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 10th generation, which, from the start, IIRC was criticized for not having the best battery life, I think, because of its processor (12th Gen Intel Core i7-1280P × 14).

I thought I had read that using a more recent kernel might help the lowish battery life problem (I'm using 6.11.0-24-generic at the moment), but it doesn't seem to help much, if at all.

I tried using tlp, which meant uninstalling power-profiles-daemon, but this just made my laptop run hot, and also screwed up my battery when I tried to set charging thresholds (had to reset it by using the emergency pin hole), so I probably won't be trying that again. Reinstalled power-profiles-daemon, and now have it on power saver; so back to normal now, not running hot, but battery life still isn't great.

Anything else I could try? There's auto-cpufreq which I used for a while on an older laptop, but that was quite a while ago . . .

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[–] matdave@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

I like to use the arch wiki to set up laptops. They are specifically written for arch, but the information can translate to basically any Linux distro

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_(Gen_10)

[–] glitching@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

firstly, tlp is a powerful tool, but you need to configure it before letting it loose, identifying components you don't need and can be powered down, figuring out power limits, etc. that's too much work for me. also, if you're on ppd, maybe try switching it with tuned and tuned-ppd, which are now default on Fedora.

can't help with your specific machine, here's what works for me. what I want is a powerful laptop that works as a workstation when on AC, sips power when mobile, and has no significant power drain when left in standby for days. so:

using Plasma, as it has (among many other benefits) different power settings for docked and on battery. so it has generous power settings on AC and then rather conservative ones on battery, and
implementing suspend-then-hibernate. the laptop sleeps normally when not used, but if not used in an hour or so, it suspends to disk and turns off all power - no more battery drain. on powering up, it resumes from disk back to how I left it - faster than cold boot!

this brings it super close to stuff I had back in the macOS days - a laptop that I can leave for days and when I pick it up heading out the door I know it has a charge.

[–] zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

I was sort of under the impression that tlp was an "install it and leave it if you want" type of thing, but that you could tweak it more to your liking if needed. 🤷‍♂️ Well, in any event it didn't work for me in either case!

Thanks for the suggestions; I might give auto-cpufreq another shot first just because I've used it in the past on another machine, but if that doesn't work, I will definitely take a look at tuned. 👍 Will try to remember to report back with the results, though it may take a while.