8mo ago

Noticably lower standby battery drain with Fedora 40

I upgraded to Fedora 40 workstation a couple of days ago. I never turn off or suspend my laptop (a Thinkbook 14s Yoga) and it was guranteed to be dead if i left it unplugged for a couple of hours before the update.

With Fedora 40 it's been unplugged for almost 5 hours and still has 52% battey left (down from 59% when i unplugged the charger).

I noticed both TLP and auto-cpufreq have been disabled after the update so this looks like default power settings are being used.

I'm not sure if it means I'll be getting consistently better battery life but i thought maybe it's a good idea to share this first impression anyway.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

14 comments

It's power-profiles-daemon. The new version came out a couple of weeks back (and reached stable bascially in the same day as F40 released) with much better performance, as it now detects if your system is running on battery and adapts both the balanced and power saver modes accordingly to save on power, it's pretty great!
- Still I am finding it difficult to believe that just being battery aware has taken battery usage from 50℅ per hour to 1.4℅ per hour
  
  It's a lot of other big improvements. The improvements were mainly made for Framework laptops but they apply to other laptops too.

I’m still on 39 and looking forward to upgrading my FW13 next weekend, this might be huge.

Running Fedora as a secondary OS from a Thunderbolt SSD. What I can tell you is that my Bios still seems to be in charge (pun intended) of the charging cycles since it wouldn't charge past 80% and I never set this in Fedora.
Otherwise runtime seems about average under use and the estimated time left on the charge seems correct.
- There is a threshold parameter you can tweak
  
  Please keep in mind that staying between 20-80% greatly improves battery life.

Amd? There have been some very nice improvements to the pstate driver lately, maybe that's what you are seeing

That's interesting. I usually skip each other fedora version, and will probably go from 39 to 41, but if there are improvements to battery life, maybe I will try it now.
- Why would you do that, there is absolutely no reason. ~~Fedora only supports upgrading one version up.~~ oops its 2
  Stay on the old stable if you like, but then switch to the latest? Why?
  
  Fedora actually supports skipping every other version. They point it at the docs:
  . System upgrade is only officially supported and tested over 2 releases at most (e.g. from 38 to 40). If you need to upgrade over more releases, it is recommended to do it in several smaller steps (read more).
  As for why I do that, the six months release cycle is too fast for me. I struggle a lot with things and end up living in a slow paced manner. In this case, the process is supported and I receive security updates normally, so I don't see a problem and it works fine for me. Besides, I have only one computer I use for everything, and I had problems with things not working properly after a distro upgrade in the past (it was with ubuntu, but I got a bit traumatized after that).

14 comments