[Solved] power management on laptop + kde

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juniper · Post by **juniper** » Thu Jun 29, 2023 9:47 pm

I am using kde.

Battery life seems kind of bad on my laptop. The laptop has a big screen with a lot of memory, so maybe I shouldn't expect great battery life.

So I was looking at the pages

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Power_management/Guide

However, it seems that some of the tools (like laptop-mode-tools) overlap with kde's power management tool (which I think are managed by the package powerdevil).

There are other tools however (like thermald etc) that I could install. Does anyone know which tools I shouldn't install given that I am using kde?[/url]

Thistled · Post by **Thistled** » Sat Jul 01, 2023 10:23 pm

How about sticking with the guide for the operating system and ignore the desktop environment guide.
Try not to mix them.
Take it from there.

Goverp · Post by **Goverp** » Sun Jul 02, 2023 10:33 am

laptop-mode-tools don't conflict with KDE's management - I use both on my laptop.
Do you have your kernel configured to allow ondemand or schedutil or similar cpu frequency control? If it's always set to "performance" you'll get terrible battery life.
Another killer, but you would probably already be aware of the problem, is swapping or paging from running too large or too many applications at once. Web browsers can cause it if you visit web sites with too much "stuff" running such as videos playing in the background or massive amounts of Javascript. Tring to compile qtwebengine on a laptop is begging for a flat battery...

Laptop mode will probably help, but not as much as you'd like! The biggest drain on most laptops after the cpu is the screen, and you can't do much to that.

juniper · Post by **juniper** » Mon Jul 03, 2023 6:01 pm

I installed tlp and thermald. I saw an arch thread about tlp being more modern and compatible with KDE.

Much better battery life now!