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Comment by sheepdestroyer | Hacker News Reader

Use a thinkpad and avoid problems

Actually, my T480 on Ubuntu 20.04 drains battery drastically while “sleeping”.

I believe it isn’t hitting S3, but I haven’t done too much troubleshooting.

I had some success with T480 sleep battery drain by finding a bios option to turn off all USB when sleeping. Went from empty overnight to can sleep over weekend.

Just tried it and it made no change, thank you for the tip anyway!

Yeah. All the PM stuff with Ubuntu and T480 was a bit of a disaster, there was issues at least with Thunderbolt and NVIDIA discrete graphics eating up the battery. IIRC in the end I think I just found a way to completely disable both.

The T480 I had was a company laptop and I don't have it anymore, so I can't check.

What's your daily driver now, if I may ask? I was seriously considering the T14, but the M1 Air is tempting me.

I now have a P14s, as a weird compromise between what I wanted (14", under 2kg), company requirements for the size class (Lenovo with Intel i7 or i9 and NVIDIA discrete graphics), and what the supplier had available with short notice. Given free choice, I'd probably got a T495 or T14 with AMD.

Mostly the P14s feels the same as the T480 did. I have none but the usual complaints (+ too new hardware so drivers are still a bit flaky), though I think the underpowered discrete graphics is a waste of money at least for my use.

Try powertop, there are some useful toggles for power savings there. I apply all saving settings automatically with a systemd service

I wouldn't say that Thinkpads are immune. Was braking my brain trying to figure out, why my X230 doesn't sleep properly. Turned out, USB hard drive was causing the issue, even when disconnected. Not sure, if it was hardware or drivers, but that drive was causing issue.

I am using a ThinkPad :)

Again, mostly it's great, but when I go to bed a night, I have a lot of "remember to plug the charger in" anxiety, it's a constant source of anxiety for me.

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