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Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-11 01:18
by JPlock
I've been using Debian 8.7 for about a month, I've notice that my battery performance on Windows is much better comparing with Debian and I was wondering if that is something that happens in every laptop or is something wrong with mine.

I am currently running Debian in a dual boot with windows.

By the way I am a linux newbie

Re: Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-12 04:33
by rhy7s
It's not just you, a laptop will usually have significantly better battery runtime under Windows. You could try out TLP to see if that gets you some benefit.

Re: Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-12 06:43
by pylkko
rhy7s wrote:It's not just you, a laptop will usually have significantly better battery runtime under Windows. You could try out TLP to see if that gets you some benefit.
Debian is a distro where you have to do things like this your self. That is install and configure laptop and power saving pavkages

Re: Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-13 23:13
by JPlock
Thank you both, I will look into that.

Re: Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-14 07:58
by deborah-and-ian

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Debian is a distro where you have to do things like this your self. That is install and configure laptop and power saving pavkages
That's half true. If you install any of the bigger desktops -- Gnome, KDE, Mate, Xfce or Cinnamon -- you get a lot of the power management out of the box. The Debian installer even detects if you have a laptop and suggests installing the "laptop" tasksel. But it's true that, with a bit of tinkering and installing a few packages or outside sources, one can squeeze a bit more out of the system.

Generally, I'll agree that Windows has better power saving due to the drivers mostly being tailored to the system. Linux drivers are very often programmed by volunteers, not by the companies that make the hardware.

These are some things I would try, also in this order:

1. If the hardware is rather new, I'd try installing a newer kernel from the Backports repositories and/or even newer video card drivers. If the hardware is older than the default kernel in Debian Stable, then an upgrade usually doesn't bring improvements.

2. Then I'd try the laptop-mode-tools package

3. Then, if that makes no difference, I'd try TLP (But please don't mix laptop-mode-tools and TLP).

Re: Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-20 18:05
by dust hill resident
Just wondering, what model of laptop do you have?

Re: Battery Performance

Posted: 2017-03-20 19:13
by stevepusser
dust hill resident wrote:Just wondering, what model of laptop do you have?
Even better, install inxi, update your systems internal hardware ID database as root or with sudo:

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update-pciids
update-usbids
then put the output of

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inxi -F
in a code box here, since that'll give a good idea of what hardware you have.