Linux Power Options

[Deuxez]

Hey there! I recently switched to Linux Mint cinnamon on my school laptop since windows 10 seemed to be really slow and sometimes even crashed on me. And i gotta say, Mint cinnamon is really easy to use, and i love it so far. I get more fps/more stable fps on games now than on windows 10, but im wondering, in windows 10 you could set power usage to either balanced, performance or battery life. Now i want to know if there are any similar settings like that here in mint cinnamon? My laptop is an lenovo thinkpad l440. I5 4300m, Intel HD grapichs 4600, 8gb ram, 500gb HDD.

 

I can run games fine, its just that i want to feel more power out of my system. Ive already seen threads like this on other forums, like "try this: /sbin/chkconfig cpuspeed off"

but none of it seemed to work. So now im here! on linustechtips forum! Hopefully yall can give me an answer!

[LukeSavenije]

i'll have to warn you... mint recently had some major bugs in it

 

i'd recommend to either install Ubuntu and Cinnamon over it (is like 2 commands)

 

or go to arch with manjaro cinnamon

[Ashleyyyy]

you can, but it's complicated and unnecessary. Linux has a better scheduler (the thing that decides what cores/threads apps use) than Windows anyway.  one thing you could try is this. type in terminal: sudo apt remove irqbalance

and type y when it prompts you for the removal of the package.

 

that will remove irqbalance that makes it so that apps are using all threads, but it can cause issues with apps that are not designed to do that. it also makes it so no one app gets full advantage of the cpu. i would say try it. 

 

 

4 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

i'd recommend to either install Ubuntu and Cinnamon over it (is like 2 commands)

or install Ubuntu Mate. that is a more user friendly distro out of the box. 

[Deuxez]

6 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

i'll have to warn you... mint recently had some major bugs in it

 

i'd recommend to either install Ubuntu and Cinnamon over it (is like 2 commands)

 

or go to arch with manjaro cinnamon

Whats the diffrence between Mint cinnamon and just Cinnamon?

[LukeSavenije]

1 minute ago, DankDeuxez said:

Whats the diffrence between Mint cinnamon and just Cinnamon?

cinnamon is made by the mint team, so it's just a ui

 

but it should look about the same on both ubuntu cinnamon (mint is ubuntu based actually), and manjaro cinnamon would look close too

[Deuxez]

I rather stay with Mint cinnamon for now, until i start experiencing bugs. I think ive already found one bug tho, my trackpad stopped working when i woke it up from sleep mode.

[Ashleyyyy]

41 minutes ago, DankDeuxez said:

Whats the diffrence between Mint cinnamon and just Cinnamon?

it's the same, but the OS underneath would be different. Mint is a bad distro overall. 

 

40 minutes ago, DankDeuxez said:

I rather stay with Mint cinnamon for now, until i start experiencing bugs. I think ive already found one bug tho, my trackpad stopped working when i woke it up from sleep mode.

yeah that is a potential issue because Mint is based on the LTS release of Ubuntu. that means it's focused on stability instead of being up-to-date. if you have a relatively new machine that means the drivers for it are not perfect. 

 

what laptop do you have? i can try to do some research on fixing that bug. 

[Deuxez]

21 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

what laptop do you have? i can try to do some research on fixing that bug. 

Its an Lenovo Thinkpad L440, with an i5 4300m intel hd grapichs 4600m 500gb hdd and 8gb ram

[Deuxez]

Could yall recommend any Linux version that are noob-friendly? Ive only used linux on my old chromebook, which was ubuntu gnome, xfce or something like that. I really like mint cinnamon but as yall said it can be a bit buggy sometimes, and ive experienced some of those bugs.

[Ashleyyyy]

@DankDeuxez just use stock Ubuntu really. 

[Deuxez]

33 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

@DankDeuxez just use stock Ubuntu really. 

I dont really like ubuntu, is it easy to use for newbies like me?

[Ashleyyyy]

Just now, DankDeuxez said:

I dont really like ubuntu, is it easy to use for newbies like me?

use Kubuntu then. it has a Windows-like UI. 

[Lukyp]

There were some applets somewhere who let you change the CPU governor but in 2019 they are not necessarily anymore, you could just make sure you got tlp installed who helps a bit with the battery life with some tweaks

[wasab]

The power settings that can be easily set and are available as actual settings are sleep time and screen dim time. 

If you are talking about windows performance mode and power saving mode which actually readjusts the cpu frequency and profile settings of your fans, it gets really complicated on linux since it doesn't have these features by default. But since it is linux....  you can pretty much hack any feature into the OS. 

 

1) To adjust cpu frequency, set the cpu govrenor. On-demand for normal, on performance for power, and power save for power save. 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling

 

2) Ajust the fan speed can be done using the fan control or notebook fan control ulitity. The latter is natively made for windows but has a linux version that runs on mono. But note unlike windows, it doesnt provide you with a pretty and user-friendly gui

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_speed_control

 

You can write a script to do these for you. If you know some programming, of like say a language like python, you can also write a gui for it that can act like actual system setting pannel. 

 

[wasab]

17 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

There were some applets somewhere who let you change the CPU governor but in 2019 they are not necessarily anymore, you could just make sure you got tlp installed who helps a bit with the battery life with some tweaks

tlp is not the same as balance, performance, or power saving mode on windows tho. 

[Shura]

For an old system, my recommendation would be Arch+Cinnamon or if you feel Cinnamon is a bit slow, Arch+XFCE+Nemo File Manager. This is not noob friendly but once setup, its really responsive. My Arch+XFCE+Nemo setup uses only 260mb of RAM at idle. Arch+Cinnamon uses 590MB which is still very low compared to some other setups. One of the biggest advantages of setting up your own Arch setup is you won't have to deal with all the bloat from some Distros.