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I was exited to try kubuntu in dual boot with windows 10. But it makes my battery life less than windows 10, even with tlp installed and windows charge capped at 60%, low brightness and prime-selec on-demand already enabled. Windows at 60% lasts for 4hrs and linux at 70% last for around 3:30. Am I misconfiguring something? Also linux shows that my battery health is decresing, after only one week it went from 97% to 91% .

Windows 10

EDIT:Ubuntu MATE 21.04

Kernel 5.11.0-16-generic

Asus Zephyrus M15 Nvidia GTX 2060

EDIT: CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=balance_power (because it lags in power) TLP Installed Battery charge capped at 60% in Ubuntu Mate

EDIT: Apparently, the battery drain occurs because video playback is run on the graphics card. However I switched from prime-select intel because it overheats for somereason.

Is there a way to avoid the videos to run on the graphics card?

thundernoodle
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1 Answers1

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  1. In case your laptop has Intel, then you can write this line into your /etc/tlp.conf file for an extra power-saving CPU profile: CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=power
    In my laptop, setting this makes sure that all my cores run on 800Mhz (when on battery) instead of the default 2.6Ghz and scaling up when needed. I haven't experienced any kind of performance regression either.

  2. I have Kubuntu myself, I noticed that for some reason, having Nvidia selected reduces the load on the CPU and my battery consumption is less. Of course, I can't be 100% sure it will be the same for you, there are a lot of factors involved internally. You can try to install this plasma widget to keep an eye on the battery consumption while using prime select Intel/Nvidia.

  3. You should check out the CLI tool powertop to see which application is consuming a lot of power.

  4. (Ignore this if you already have charge thresholds set) About battery health, you should try to set charge thresholds if you have a habit of keeping your A/C plugged on even after 100% charge for a long time. I believe Asus laptops with newer Linux kernel versions allow it by doing something like:
    echo 60 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold
    as mentioned here. Also, try to make sure you don't let your battery levels go below 40%.

Atul Gopinathan
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  • Thank you for your answer!. i was using CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=power but reverted to balance_power because it was lagging, I switched to Ubuntu MATE and it lasts a little longer. I was testing nvidia-on demand but I get a few more minutes with prime-select intel. I'm starting to think this might be some hardware issue because below 1GHz it lags a little. – thundernoodle May 18 '21 at 21:58