TLP: Utility for Optimizing Linux Laptop Battery Life (Thinkpad and Others)
linrunner.de
linrunner.de
Every release of Ubuntu and Fedora since has caused a lowering of battery life. Current versions of both get me about 2 1/2 hours of battery life extended to 3 hours if I install TLP.
So TLP helps but in my case is putting lipstick on a pig.
Obviously there have been regressions somewhere along the way which have caused battery life to drop from bad to fantastically awful. It seems to be an issue with many AMD laptops. There have been proposed reasons for it and fixes for those reasons. Although these fixes have helped some people they haven't helped a lot of folks including myself. Part of the problem is that no one wants to own the issue. The Linux developers have no obligation to deal with it, the distributions don't want to be bothered and Linux is a small enough part of the market that the laptop vendors don't want to throw any resources at it. AMD doesn't seem to want to invest in figuring it out either since it doesn't seem to affect their newer laptop chips.
My battery life running Windows 10 when the laptop was released was around 8 hours. My battery life now running Windows 11 is about 8 hours.
For now I run Windows and use WSL1 if I need a Unix like environment. I say WSL1 because there is an issue that prevents the laptop from sleeping properly if WSL2 or anything that uses virtualization is running. Sigh. Again a common issue across AMD laptops and one that can be fixed with a bios change but few vendors have released updated bios to address it.
I look forward to TLP significantly helping my Linux battery life in a couple of years when I get a new non-AMD laptop.