How to Maximize Battery Life of a Linux Laptop – Guide
A recent study has shown that on a laptop with an Intel Core i5-8250U processor, running Windows 10, it takes about 8 hours to hit the 4 hour battery cutoff on Ubuntu. This is because the Linux kernel must support a large number of hardware features, including graphics and storage.
Linux users tend to extend the life of older hardware devices by using a battery-saving feature called hibernation. Hibernation is a feature of Linux that suspends the operating system and all its processes so that the computer can sleep for a short period of time. This allows the battery to last longer when used in combination with other features of Linux, such as screen saver or graphics card.
How to Maximize Your Linux LaptopBattery
Use built-in power settings
If the laptop is plugged in to the power outlet and the battery is at least 50% charged, it should be able to start up and display a message that says “Laptop started up on battery power.” If not, you may need to change some of the power management settings on your Linux operating system.
Ubuntu offers a variety of power options, such as turning off screens when inactive, limiting CPU usage, and adjusting the power management settings. ..
After opening the settings screen, adjust the settings in the battery usage column to conserve power. For example, you have the option to “Suspend if inactive for…” and set a time or condition. Or you can specify what happens when the power supply is critically low. ..
When the lid is closed, you can pause the activity, but you may prefer a different option.
Linux laptop comparison screen on Windows
Reduce the brightness of your monitor
One way to extend battery life is to dim your screen. The easiest way is to check the keyboard for shortcut brightness controls. If your keyboard doesn’t have them, you’ll have to use your operating system controls.
To improve battery life, adjust your brightness slider to a compromise between lower and higher brightness levels.
The dim screen setting can save power by reducing the amount of light that is used.
According to the Ubuntu team, using a lighter desktop background can save up to 1% of your power usage. ..
Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
The main point of this article is that connectivity options are always an issue to maintain battery life. In order to keep your device connected, you should consider ways to improve your current setup and make sure that you have the necessary ports and cables available.
Wi-Fi can be a big battery drain if you frequently check for new networks to connect to or refresh all open tabs on your website. To overcome this, the simplest option is to disable Wi-Fi. ..
To connect to a wireless network, open the system tray and click on the wireless network icon. In the menu that appears, click Enable Wi-Fi to enable Wi-Fi and disable it if you don’t want to use it. ..
When it comes to Bluetooth, older hardware is more likely to have issues. If your laptop have Bluetooth 4.0 LTE, you should be fine. However, if your computer does not have hardware that supports Bluetooth 4.0 LTE, you will encounter higher battery consumption.
To disable Bluetooth, open the Bluetooth settings in your system tray and toggle it to “Off.” Be careful when using Bluetooth-enabled devices; they will be disabled immediately. ..
Another option is to disable older Bluetooth hardware and buy a USB Bluetooth 4.0 LTE dongle. And if you want to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with a single tap, try Airplane Mode.
Close all applications you are not using
Linux battery drain is easy to ignore, but it’s actually a major issue that can impact your overall battery life. To keep your apps open and your system running smoothly, you need to be aware of how multitasking can impact your battery.
If you are using another application, it will consume CPU and RAM. These applications can be your browser, email client, Skype for Linux, or whatever. Not only do they draw power from the battery for additional CPU and RAM resources, but their presence also means the fan has to work harder.
- Right-click the icon on the taskbar, launcher or dock and select Exit.
- In the meantime, if you’re having trouble closing apps on Linux, these tips should help:
- Close all open apps by clicking the three lines in the top left corner of your screen and selecting “Exit.”
- If you’re having trouble closing apps quickly, try using one of these methods: a) Shortcut keys: Right-click on an app and select “Close.” This will close all open apps in your system at once.
- System Preferences: Click “Taskbar” in the top left corner of your screen and then click “Close All Apps.” This will close all open apps except for those you’ve closed before.
Eject any external/removable media
Hard drives use up battery life. All the moving parts need something to power them, and the same goes for DVD drives. But their battery is specifically designed for these devices. Unless you’ve switched to a solid-state drive, your hard drive is practically necessary. ..
External hard drives and DVD drives have their own power supply, while flash drives and SD cards do not. So it makes perfect sense to eject these media devices when not in use.
It’s not just the laptop battery that should be able to handle DVD playback; it’s also a good idea to remove disks from the computer when not in use. This will prevent sudden autoloading of disks.
If you have an optical drive, you should replace it with an SSD to improve performance.
Manage your Flash settings (or uninstall)
Adobe has finally announced that Flash will be discontinued as of 2020. Despite this, many websites still require the software in order to function. It is not ideal, but it is likely that you will need to install Flash on your Linux laptop in 2020. ..
It is clear that using Flash is a huge resource drain on your system, with a huge battery drain. What’s the solution?
There are several ways to avoid Adobe Flash videos playing automatically in your browser. You can uninstall Adobe Flash and hope for the best, or you can configure your browser so that Flash videos don’t play automatically.
Mozilla Firefox users can open the Add-ons menu and select Plugins. Set Shockwave Flash to Never activate here. Or use the Ask to Activate option if you need Flash from time to time. That way, when a video loads, you’ll be prompted to enable Flash before it plays.
Chrome allows you to toggle whether sites are allowed to run Flash. You can also choose to have Chrome ask before running Flash on websites. ..
Chrome://flags/screen
Install TLP for Linux
There are several software programs that can be installed on Linux to improve laptop battery life. One such program is TLP, which comes with a default configuration file to help you get started.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tlp/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install tlp
- Update the software to the latest version.
- Reboot your computer.
- Install the update and reboot your computer again.
sudo apt install tcpdump sudo apt install libpcap1
IBM ThinkPad users will need to install the following dedicated packages in order to use their laptops: ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015) - ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015)_nb_us.exe ThinkPad X2 Carbon (2016) - ThinkPad X2 Carbon (2016)_nb_us.exe ThinkPad Yoga (2013) - ThinkPad Yoga (2013)_nb_us.exe Thinkpad Y530 (2014) - Thinkpad Y530 (2014)_nb_us.exe
This will install the tp-smapi-dkms and acpi-call-tools packages, which are needed to enable the thermal management features of the Linux kernel. ..
If you are running Fedora, add the repositories to your system with the following command:
yum addrepository “http://mirror.fedoraproject.org/fedora/linux/$releasever"
yum localinstall –nogpgcheck http://repo.linrunner.de/fedora/tlp/repos/releases/tlp-release-1.0-0.noarch.rpm
Fedora Release: stable noarch
git clone https://github.com/apache/incubator-maven.git git push origin master
the code below into your browser to access the free online dating site. The code is: ..
After setup, TLP will run every time the computer boots.
Standard usage with TLP is fine, but you may prefer to tweak some of the settings to suit your laptop. Running the configuration guide in your preferred text editor will allow you to adjust the settings
The TLP documentation provides several settings that can be used to improve or harm laptop battery life. It is important to change settings and reboot when making changes, as the different settings may affect different laptops in different ways.
Final note
This guide will teach you how to maximize the battery life of a Linux laptop. If you have any questions about this article, please don’t hesitate to ask us. Additionally, please share this guide with your friends and family so that they can also benefit from its tips.
