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Comment by nobleach | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to hear more about the tweaks you've done to Arch. I've gone little beyond a few power management things myself (On a Thinkpad X1C Gen 6). I get decent battery life, but I know it could be better. And giving up Arch would be a tough sell to myself.

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I have the same laptop as you. Just install the "tlp" package (The Laptop Project). I'm using Debian but the Arch package should have the same name. You can tweak the settings (/etc/default/tlp on Debian) but out of the box that should get you arround ~4W depending on what is running on your laptop. With light usage that gives more than 10 hours of battery life, even if you don't charge the battery to the max to increase its life (see START/STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0 for Thinkpads in the tlp configuration).

If you have a SSD you can be aggressive on the disk suspend timeout, as there's no spin up/down wear issue as with mechanical disks.

With this the battery life is good enough that I never felt the need to optimize further.

[1] https://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html

Fantastic. Thanks for the info. I've installed tlp, but I never really looked too deeply into it (yet). Most days at the office I'm plugged in - and that can be a problem too with the battery constantly receiving a charge.

Very little was needed at all, and what I did do is mostly working around firmware bugs.

- Force deep sleep mode, as s2idle doesn't work.

- Set the ASPM policy. To anything. Basically the default doesn't work. (I went with 'powersave', obviously.)

- Run powertop --auto-tune on boot.

- Set the cool-bottom thermal profile, but that's just to make it work as a lap top.

- Run a BIOS upgrade. :V

(fwupdmgr did the whole job for me~)

Awesome, thanks. My BIOS upgrades are such a mess. I get notified that I have them.... but they always fail. I haven't dug into the logs to see why. This is honestly the most lazy I've ever been with a Linux install in 20 years, mostly because everything is working "well enough" that I haven't spent time tweaking it. Better battery life/cooler bottom does sound like something I should strive for though.

I run Fedora on a Thinkpad X1C Gen 3. tlp[1] has been, by far, the best tool in optimising my power usage. powertop for some monitoring, as these days it recommends some less than ideal tunables, especially with regards to SATA power management ("med_power_with_dipm" vs "min_power" [2][3]).

Some modules also have blacklists that prevent certain power saving modes from being enabled. This is true for the snd-hda-intel module to prevent a well known popping sound. Since disabling the blacklist, I haven't encountered the issue however YMMV. Similarly to enable ASPM on the PCIE bus, I've had to force it via a kernel parameter.

With regards to the GPU, I noticed my Intel GPU can scale its frequency between 300mhz and 950mhz but the default minimum was set to 350mhz. Other such tweaks such as enabling frame buffer compression [4], can save you a few more watts.

While the Linux defaults does its best to be suitable across different hardware configurations, you'll have to meddle with many parameters to get it customised to your configuration, and that could bring some instability with it so exercise some caution.

Oh, and also be mindful of the apps you run. The Great Suspender for Chrome can save you some watts, cpu and memory by suspending tabs that are not in use. And switching to a light desktop such as Sway or i3 can also do wonders.

As I type this, my battery is reporting a draw of 3.1 watts, 30% battery remaining with 4:40 of operating time at the current workload.

[1] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TLP

[2] - https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/18412.html

[3] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management#SATA_A...

[4] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics#Framebuf...

Thanks! Yeah, Just running Slack and Chrome (not to mention Spotify sometimes) can send my resource usage fairly high. I went back to Vim (from a couple of Electron-based editors running in vim-emulation mode). I used i3 a bit for about a year and never quite got it to my liking. Things like bluetooth and audio management seemed kinda hacked together - because they were. i3 isn't an environment, it's just a window manager. That's totally great, but KDE seems so seamless in this area. Worth looking into again though.

The thing with arch is it’s mostly not more tweaks that give you better battery, it’s not having all the crap that Ubuntu preloads running that makes that happen.

Folks think I'm crazy for using Arch as my main dev machine. I'm not an Ubuntu hater at all (it runs my main server in the basement at home)... but it'd be awfully hard to go back to using it as my main machine.

Really? Arch is... boring. Once you've set it up, nothing happens without your permission and you can just keep developing away. Sure you have updates imposed on you, but you can delay them a bit if you dont have time right now, and its not like upgrades are indefinitely avoidable on any other OS.

Using Arch often gives me advance warning that my apps will break on users machines due to changes in libraries. I see the changes first and can add compatibility for the new library version such that it's fixed before affecting my users.

I love it as a daily driver.

Yeah, for me, it's "just right". Most detractors claim it's "bleeding edge". What? just because it's got something newer than Postgres 9.1 available?? (this was my argument against Debian/Ubuntu for a long time)

Totally agree that it's a great daily driver. It has EVERYTHING!

Totally, Arch feels snappier in the same hardware that I am surprised that my machine can hold a lot of power for development.

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