Arch battery optomization

Napoleon469420Xx · 2020-04-15 06:00:36

Hello everyone. I've finally got around to figuring out how to run arch and it's been a blast. It works great on desktop, but I've been having trouble with my laptop.

I have a 2012 macbook air and honestly I'm surprised how well it has held up. I really only need it to basic document editing, light web browsing, and maybe some youtube. It's basically a chromebook at this point and from that perspective, it's a great device. The only problem with it is battery life, which is at about 80% capacity.

I've tried just about everything I can think of and Arch is just a complete battery hog. I've tried running it with kde and without, with powertop, lts, (one, the other, and both at the same time), and I've tried scaling my cpu frequency as low as 800mhz. The absolute best battery life I could get out of it was slightly over three hours with a power draw of 7.5mw. This was with absolutely nothing running, bluetooth and wifi disabled, every connector disabled, cpu locked at 800mhz, keyboard backlight off, and screen backlight as low as I could tolerate; hardly a functional machine. The average battery life I'd get while actually using the machine on usable settings was between 1.5 and 2 hours.

For perspective, the latest version of macos averaged about 3.5 hours out of the box with nothing done to the cpu, keyboard & screen brightness on medium, wifi on, all while actually running the few programs I need at the same time. I recently downgraded the system to mountain lion and it performed even better. Over 5 (FIVE!) hours.

So what else is there that I can do to get the most out of this machine? Mountain lion was a great os back in the day, but it's almost a decade old with almost no support. Is arch even the right distro for my use? I've tried running ubuntu on it and the results were comparable to what I'm seeing on arch iirc.

sabroad · 2020-04-15 23:53:25

Use powertop to check the CPU is entering >=pc6 states and be sure to apply recommendations.

Tune further with the guide at Power Saving and don't miss anything out. Pay special attention to Bus Power Management.

Anecdotally, my non-macbook has <2W draw browsing with Firefox in Arch using aforementioned tweaks.

Napoleon469420Xx · 2020-04-16 16:13:13

Thanks for the reply. Since my op I did a few things like lock the screen brightness to ~30%, switch from kde to i3, and switched out firefox for dillo. Battery life is already up from < 2 hrs to slightly > 4. For my use that's sufficient, but my power draw only gets as low a 6.5 - 7 w. I'll definitely give that guide a try and report back.

HaxNet · 2020-04-16 20:21:27

im using my macbook air 2013 and I only get maxed 75% battery at full charge. I used i3 and installed tlp so I get about 2-3.5 hours of use depending what it is

Arch Linux

#1 2020-04-15 06:00:36

Arch battery optomization

#2 2020-04-15 23:53:25

Re: Arch battery optomization

#3 2020-04-16 16:13:13

Re: Arch battery optomization

#4 2020-04-16 20:21:27

Re: Arch battery optomization

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