How to improve your BATTERY LIFE on LINUX!
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00:32 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
01:38 State of your battery
02:56 Hardware acceleration
06:30 TLP
09:42 Dual GPU setups
11:36 Other basic tips
13:34 Other tools and parting thoughts
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Check battery health: upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
If you watch videos or stream movies and shows from your browser, check that it's actually using your GPU to accelerate that video decoding.
To check that in Firefox, type about:support in the URL bar, then search for "compositing" in the page. If it says "webrender", you're good.
To check if the GPU is used to decode videos, you can also search for "hardware_video_decoding". If it says "default available", you're good.
On Chromium based browsers, to check for that, type chrome://gpu in the URL bar.
On Firefox, to enable that, open the about:config page, then search for media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled. Double click the value to set it to true.
On any chrome based browser, you can just go to the settings, to "system", and toggle "use graphics acceleration when available". Provided your distro has the required packages, you should be good.
And, if you have an older chipset that isn't able to decode all formats using the GPU, like for example VP8 or VP9, you have browser extensions, called enhanced-h264ify for Firefox, or h264ify for Chrome, which will let you set h264 as the default codec on youtube.
One of the most useful tools here will be TLP. It's a command line only tool, but fear not, there's a graphical user interface that's much more user friendly here, called TLP UI.
Once installed, TLP will run automatically in the background after the first reboot. If you open TLP UI after that, you should see that it's enabled, and get access to all the various settings.
TLP documentation: https://linrunner.de/tlp/usage/index....
Now, if your computer has 2 GPUs, an integrated one, and a dedicated one, you might also want to check which one you're using: when using your laptop unplugged, you might want to just use the integrated GPU, and when plugged in, the dedicated GPU.
The easiest way to do so is by staying in hybrid graphics mode. If you have an nvidia GPU, and the proprietary drivers you can just open th Nvidia settings app, and head over to the "prime profiles" tab, and select "Nvidia on demand".
If you really want the best savings though, then you'll need to completely disable the dedicated GPU, either by using "Intel (power saving mode) in the nvidia settings app, or by using the BIOS to set your GPU to integrated only.
And of course, there are the usual basic changes you can make: the usual screen brightness thing, this can save you a ton of battery. The display's refresh rate is also a factor, and variable refresh rate will let you save some battery.
The more recent your hardware is, the better the chances a more recent kernel and drivers will have better hardware support and better performance and battery life.