How can I improve battery life on Ubuntu?

[AlTech]

Hi guys,

 

For the past few days, I've been dual-booting Ubuntu + Windows on my Pro 4.

 

Battery life when running Ubuntu is substantially lower than Windows. At least 2x worse than Windows.

 

What can I do to solve this?

 

OS: Ubuntu 17.04 with Latest Updates Installed

 

Kernel Version:

Quote

Linux __________  4.10.0-35-generic #39-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 13 07:46:59 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

Thanks much .

 

[Ashleyyyy]

Pro 4?

 

specs?

 

[Sir Asvald]

10 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

Pro 4?

 

specs?

 

I think he is talking about the Surface Pro 4..

[AlTech]

12 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

Pro 4?

 

specs?

 

Surface Pro 4 i7

 

1 minute ago, Abdul201588 said:

I think he is talking about the Surface Pro 4..

Yeah, SP4 i7 .

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

reduce screen brightness is best battery saver u got

 

the screen takes like 80-90% of the batteries life :c

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, Valkyrie Lenneth said:

reduce screen brightness is best battery saver u got

 

the screen takes like 80-90% of the batteries life :c

I already did that.

[Radium_Angel]

17.04 doesn't have good battery management. I found 16.04 LTS to be better, but it's still not anywhere near what it should be. The issue lies within the drivers. Under the Windows landscape, drivers are written with power saving in mind (on laptops anyway) with full access to design specs and whatnot. Not always the case under *nix. Turning off things not in use, like a NIC, isn't always straightforward under Ubuntu, unless you know what you are doing.

 

Sadly, I don't think you're going to find much improvement no matter what you do.

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

17.04 doesn't have good battery management. I found 16.04 LTS to be better, but it's still not anywhere near what it should be. The issue lies within the drivers. Under the Windows landscape, drivers are written with power saving in mind (on laptops anyway) with full access to design specs and whatnot. Not always the case under *nix. Turning off things not in use, like a NIC, isn't always straightforward under Ubuntu, unless you know what you are doing.

 

Sadly, I don't think you're going to find much improvement no matter what you do.

So, wait for 17.10 and see what that brings?

[Radium_Angel]

I don't think you are going to see improvements from .04 to .10, it's the driver issue more than the underlying OS. It's one of the many areas where *nix lags in, and since creating better power management isn't "sexy" to do, no one does it. They're too busy falling all over themselves to write the next SystemD or Windows killer. I'm a big fan of *nix but I am not blind it the glaring, gaping, and legion flaws it has that are unlikely to ever be solved.

[deadaccount69]

Damn not a single legit answer here guys? All just speculation? C'mon... 

Install tlp:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp -y
sudo tlp start

This by default comes with a lot of optimisations, although there is room for improvement with settings tweaking.

Next:

Install preload:

sudo apt install preload -y

This caches commonly used programs/files into free memory reducing HDD access(performance and battery life improvement.)

Finally install powertop.

sudo apt install powertop -y

This program allows you to see which programs are using the most power and causing the cpu to wake most often etc... It also allows you to tune a few things that can help a lot with power usage.

You can run it like so:

sudo powertop

Then just hit tab until you are on the "tunables" section.

These are all the little settings/flags that can be changed to help with power draw. If it says "BAD" then it means the optimisation isn't applied. In general it's good to go through them one by one and figure out what they do but I'm a pretty lazy guy so I usually just enable everything.(space bar to toggle optimisation on/off.)

[deadaccount69]

Keep in mind that it's always unlikely you'll be able to get the same battery life in linux as windows under the same sort of workload assuming the windows drivers are all correct. However, with some tweaking you can get pretty damn close to perfect. To be clear, it's not linux's fault. Unix OSes can be extremely efficient(macOS for example) but unfortunately, linux-based operating systems tend to be a bit behind in terms of drivers support etc. Additionally, for some inexplicable reason, distro devs seem to be terrible at decision making when it comes to default settings/tuning for the more technical side of things(ubuntu's default swappiness for example). TLP/PowerTOP/Preload should come installed and tweaked by default IMO but most distros don't bother.

[Radium_Angel]

One other thing, a desktop manager that is less resource intensive or GFX hungry will help, something lightweight like Fluxbox.