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My previous experiences with using transparency (on Windows) have indicated it causes serious battery drain. I'm loving Hera, but the battery usage is very poor and I'm wondering if it has to do (at least partially) with transparency. I have used "tlp" but no noticeable improvement.

I found the page on turning off transparency on Loki and Freya but it didn't work for me. I also tried "System Settings >> Desktop >> Appearance" to switch "Panel translucency" to both settings but no luck. Every time I open a new Terminal it is transparent. Only when I lock it to one side of the screen does it lose transparency.

So how do I turn off ALL transparency on Hera?

UPDATE: The answer helped me turn off transparency on Terminals but that did NOT lead to any noticeable improvement in battery usage.

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  • In order to improve your battery life i can recommend you to try powertop also. Tlp works great if it is configured well. On my laptop without tlp and powertop the battery goes empty for something like 2-3 hours max but now in light conditions (browsing using firefox and watching movies with mpv) it takes more than 7 hours until battery is discharged.
    – Bo rislav
    Jan 8 '20 at 20:18
  • So turning off transparency has not made a noticeable difference. I'm looking at powertop now. Thanks for the tip!
    – Akash Sharma
    Jan 9 '20 at 3:33
  • @Bo Rislav, I installed and ran powertop and saw the tunables that were in the "Bad" state. Then I enabled the service that would set the "Bad" tunables to "Good" on startup and now my battery usage is definitely better! Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
    – Akash Sharma
    Jan 9 '20 at 23:41
  • You are welcome, if you open your /etc/default/tlp file and edit it following the comments there your battery life will be improved more
    – Bo rislav
    Jan 9 '20 at 23:50
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Running this command will remove the transparency effect in Terminal:
gsettings set io.elementary.terminal.settings background 'rgb(46, 46, 46)'

To return to default, run:
gsettings set io.elementary.terminal.settings background 'rgba(46, 46, 46, 0.95)'

Let us know if this affects battery life or not :)

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  • Thanks a lot! And now new terminals show up WITHOUT being transparent - just as I wanted! Yes, I'll post a comment later about whether this helped battery usage or not.
    – Akash Sharma
    Jan 8 '20 at 19:11

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