elementary OS Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and users of elementary OS and applications. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Well, I have to say, the battery life from my Acer laptop while using the elementary OS is horrible, while on a full charge, it says it has around 2~3h to discharge while using Debian without tlp, laptop-mode-tools or powertop, handled 4~5h. I know that elementary OS is not lightweight, but why is that battery consumption so high?
Yes, I've read most posts/articles on "how to improve my battery life" like and most of them, did little to nothing at all. Any tips and tricks?
inxi -F output
Do you happen to be running elementaryOS on a laptop with a dedicated Nvidia graphics card?
It may be the case that elementaryOS can't power-manage it well (it is the case on many distros, thanks Nvidia), especially if you use the Nouveau driver.
Check out Bumblebee, it allows you to manually manage your GPUs.
There are multiple reasons. One is that elementary uses a lot more animations and transparency. However, that not the whole picture. Also debian is a lot more conservative in design of there system. However, I like the UX of elementary a lot. ;-)
Well I know you already stumbled upon powertop you might want to give this another try. Did you use the report function already?
For those who running into similar power consumption issues and don't know the tool yet, here is short description on how to install powertop:
To install the tool open a terminal (SUPER + T)
sudo apt-get install powertop
sudo powertop --calibrate
The calibration can take up to one hour. Don't use your laptop during the process to get the best results.
sudo powertop --auto-tune
Set the optimized parameters automatically. Keep in mind,these settings are not permanent. The system will reset back to “Bad” power performance after restarting the machine.
sudo powertop --html=power_report.html
powertop will create a report in the power_report.html listing the top power consumers. Maybe there is a tool that points out. Good luck!
Powertop is a really complex tool. You can take a look on the user guide here
