Hello all, since I recently started to optimize my old laptop a bit more having a bit of spare time I was wondering would installing TLP or any similar app help me with battery longevity since I still have a decent 4-6 hours on a battery I got with my laptop when I bought it in 2018ish.
It's Acer Aspire i-5 8th gen with intel 620UHD and 8GB ram
My battery info are as stated in terminal:
native-path: BAT1
vendor: LG
model: PABAS0241231
serial: 41167
power supply: yes
updated: Sun 18 May 2025 02:56:42 PM CEST (1 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: discharging
warning-level: none
energy: 34.9296 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 36.4648 Wh
energy-full-design: 48.944 Wh
energy-rate: 8.0408 W
voltage: 16.166 V
charge-cycles: N/A
time to empty: 4.3 hours
percentage: 95%
capacity: 74.5031%
technology: lithium-ion
icon-name: 'battery-full-symbolic'
History (charge):
1747572972 95.000 discharging
History (rate):
1747573002 8.041 discharging
1747572972 7.448 discharging
1747572942 5.670 discharging
1747572912 4.317 discharging
There is a high probability that you are already using tlp in default configuration. Ubuntu MATE comes with the tlp package preinstalled.
https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/24.04.2/release/ubuntu-mate-24.04.2-desktop-amd64.manifest
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There is also laptop-mode-tools. You can't run tlp and laptop-mode-tools at the same time, both have their good points and faults.
Battery life on Linux has been an issue for years. I would think something that saves battery life would be worthwhile to run.
If you are having real issues powertop can help you track down the power vampire.
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Yes you are right! I did not even know that it was a thing! Thank you a thousand times you've just made my day!
I checked tlp and it indeed is working ! Now it all makes much more sense in retrospect since I was surprised that my old battery still worked as I remember long time ago when I had a HP laptop with brand new windows 7 back in the day it was a bigger and better battery than this one in Acer but it died on me in under 5 year span for some reason
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Thank you for your suggestion - I was actually just checking since I was wondering how come this setup I have of Ubuntu MATE is so gentle on my battery considering the age and my usage (mostly browsing, writing and occasional old RTS game)
I will surely check out and learn more about the link you've send me - I was always interested in optimizing my laptop to run as smoothly as possible since it's only thing I have for now so I don't want it do die on me until I buy a new desktop by the end of the year haha
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A word of warning about powertop; I found that it never 'calibrated' particularly well, and would often attribute high usage to devices that weren't drawing much/any power (i.e. even when the device was disabled entirely, it would report high usage).
I haven't tested this yet, but I have heard that - for those with AMD CPUs - enabling the AMD p-state driver (and governor) can yield an improvement in power consumption. The issue for me is that I need to do some whacky BIOS stuff (to enable CPPC - see e.g. Linux battery life on an Asus G14), so it's off the cards until I can 'risk' the time repairing my laptop if it goes bad.
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