[sf-lug] battery life on laptops OK?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> Hi LUGers,
> 
> Well if your battery life is not ok you might want to look around for
> the TLP packages.  According to my information it is a superior tool
> for extending laptop battery life.  This was just added to the
> PCLinuxOS repositories at the request of a user/forum member.

_Merely_ adding the TLP power-management utility might not have the
benefit you're suggesting -- unless the admin also adjusts the charge
thresholds in /etc/default/tlp .  (I see claims that TLP's defaults are
good, but it's worth checking.)  Something like 40% charge as the start
threshold an 60% as the stop threshold will give you the optimal battery
life -- but, of course, at some cost to battery-based runtimes.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48534/how-to-adjust-charging-thresholds-of-laptop-battery
https://superuser.com/questions/502328/how-does-limiting-a-laptop-batterys-full-charge-to-less-than-100-extend-its-ba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Lifespan

TLP's upstream maintainer's site is here, and has good docs:
https://linrunner.de/tlp/

Most common distros already had TLP in their package collections.

Be aware that TLP will probably conflict with other power management
suites, i.e., you can have only one at a time.

> It has requires the invidious systemd to work previously but one of
> our Brazilian users and packagers figured out a way around this silly
> requirement.

Er, there is/was no such dependency.  Check for yourself:
https://linrunner.de/tlp/developers/dependencies.html
https://linrunner.de/tlp/developers/architecture.html

To be sure, TLP does require monitoring and acting on kernel events, but
that's not the same as requiring systemd.