Hacker News Reader

Comment by llampx | Hacker News Reader

I recently installed Ubuntu 19.10 on my Thinkpad and one of the first things I noticed was how bad battery life was. If this tool can help, it'll be a godsend.

View on HN

You'll probably get a lot more benefit from just pulling up powertop and fixing whatever dumb thing is eating your battery. Common issues that are never right by default are PCIe ASPM, SATA ALPM, audio codecs that are always powered, USB devices that are always active, bluetooth spamming away when you're not using it, etc.

    sudo apt-get -y install laptop-mode

Enjoy your significantly better battery life. It tweaks a number of system settings and cpu behaviour based on if you're hooked up to mains or not.

How does laptop-mode compare to tlp? Doe it try to to the same thing or are they compatible with each other?

They try to do the same things in different implementations. They conflict with each other and you shouldn't install both. Tlp seems to be the modern default replacing laptop-mode, but I don't have details around why.

I've not had the same issue on my Thinkpad X1C6. I think I installed TLP and Powertop but the battery life is better than Windows for my use case.

I agree. Before TLP and powertop the battery life is worse, but with TPL and powertop the battery life easily beats Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com