Noticably lower standby battery drain with Fedora 40
I upgraded to Fedora 40 workstation a couple of days ago. I never turn off or suspend my laptop (a Thinkbook 14s Yoga) and it was guranteed to be dead if i left it unplugged for a couple of hours before the update.
With Fedora 40 it's been unplugged for almost 5 hours and still has 52% battey left (down from 59% when i unplugged the charger).
I noticed both TLP and auto-cpufreq have been disabled after the update so this looks like default power settings are being used.
I'm not sure if it means I'll be getting consistently better battery life but i thought maybe it's a good idea to share this first impression anyway.
Has anyone had a similar experience?
It's power-profiles-daemon. The new version came out a couple of weeks back (and reached stable bascially in the same day as F40 released) with much better performance, as it now detects if your system is running on battery and adapts both the balanced and power saver modes accordingly to save on power, it's pretty great!
Still I am finding it difficult to believe that just being battery aware has taken battery usage from 50℅ per hour to 1.4℅ per hour
It's a lot of other big improvements. The improvements were mainly made for Framework laptops but they apply to other laptops too.
I’m still on 39 and looking forward to upgrading my FW13 next weekend, this might be huge.
Running Fedora as a secondary OS from a Thunderbolt SSD. What I can tell you is that my Bios still seems to be in charge (pun intended) of the charging cycles since it wouldn't charge past 80% and I never set this in Fedora.
Otherwise runtime seems about average under use and the estimated time left on the charge seems correct.
There is a threshold parameter you can tweak
Please keep in mind that staying between 20-80% greatly improves battery life.
battery health != battery life
just a small fix, battery life is usually referred for the amount of time you can get out of a single charge, battery health for how long your battery will last over the years maintaining its capacity
Thanks. I've been able lenovo's charging threshold feature and it won't charge past 60%.
Amd? There have been some very nice improvements to the pstate driver lately, maybe that's what you are seeing
That's interesting. I usually skip each other fedora version, and will probably go from 39 to 41, but if there are improvements to battery life, maybe I will try it now.
Why would you do that, there is absolutely no reason.
Fedora only supports upgrading one version up.oops its 2Stay on the old stable if you like, but then switch to the latest? Why?
Fedora actually supports skipping every other version. They point it at the docs:
As for why I do that, the six months release cycle is too fast for me. I struggle a lot with things and end up living in a slow paced manner. In this case, the process is supported and I receive security updates normally, so I don't see a problem and it works fine for me. Besides, I have only one computer I use for everything, and I had problems with things not working properly after a distro upgrade in the past (it was with ubuntu, but I got a bit traumatized after that).
TBF with Ubuntu it's only partly their fault. The other part is indirect due to the way apt works and the spread of third-party repos (launchpad etc.) that would throw you in dependency hell come upgrade time.
Ubuntu (and Debian, and any distro using apt) are badly in need of some way to dissociate core packages from third-party better. For Ubuntu that way was snap.
People may dislike the politics around snap or the technical implementation but the reason Ubuntu resorted to it is valid.