Fedora Workstation vs KDE for battery life?

[u/Liminal_Echo]

I've been using CachyOS on an ASUS gaming laptop for about a year and recently go a secondhand P14s Gen 5 (Intel), so I just put Cachy on that too. Everything works well except the battery life isn't great so I'm thinking of changing to Fedora, which has a rep for pretty decent power management. Is there any difference when it comes battery consumption between Workstation and KDE?

[u/zardvark]

Regardless of your distro / DE, most repositories include third party power & battery management tools.

[u/jonstoppable]

under the hood, its usually the same. they use the same kernel and the same power management. between two 'full fat' DEs like gnome( workstation) and kde it's probably a few minutes.

what cpu do you have? do you have the nvidia graphics?

also, if you run powertop, what metrics are you seeing?

which battery size do you have, and what is the battery health? ( ps14s batteries seem to be generous. 57 and 75w)

[u/extoniks → u/jonstoppable]

+1, the default tuned is good but I prefer tlp

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

The p14s has an Ultra 7 155H and an RTX 500 ada. The battery is a 57wh.

[u/jonstoppable → u/Liminal_Echo]

i see . are you using the nouveau or the nvidia graphics driver?

also, what times are you getting now vs windows?

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

I'm using the Nvidia drivers. Not sure how it would compare to windows as I installed CachyOS as soon as I got the laptop.

[u/jonstoppable → u/Liminal_Echo]

i dig. how many hours do you get now? ( and with what screen)

did you run the powertop , what was your draw while on battery? also in the tunables part, were there many items in bad?

( i mean, if it is that you're not currently optimised for battery life but more for performance, you may be do some tweaks to get some

i will tell you that out of the box, recently i have had a great experience with debian forky ( installed trixie then went to testing). it looks like i was able to get another hour ,maybe 90 mins without me doing any tweaks.. however i have an ancient stack in comparison to yours ( 8th gen integrated igpu, as opposed to your hybrid cpu and gfx combos) .

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

I get about 4 hours at the moment. I have a 400 nits WUXGA screen, not 3k or OLED. Still need to run powertop. Thanks for you input and patience, appreciate it.

[u/jonstoppable → u/Liminal_Echo]

no worries, man! . ah @ screen. shouldn't be a major source of drain.. the psref said though, the WUXGA was a 300 nit

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P14s_Gen_5_Intel/ThinkPad_P14s_Gen_5_Intel_Spec.pdf
did you change it?

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

No, you're right, it is 300 nits, my mistake.

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

According to powertop the draw on the battery is 14.8w idling.

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/Liminal_Echo]

Upon further testing powertop seems to have done the trick, battery draw is now down to 6.13w. No need to change to Fedora.

[u/jonstoppable → u/Liminal_Echo]

ah awesome! didnt see your response. that's great. yeah did you use the autotune function ?

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

No worries. Yeah, I did.

[u/jonstoppable → u/Liminal_Echo]

excellent! as it's temporary, you would have to run it again when you're on battery you can create something to run it on startup..but there's a drawback as it might cause some perceived 'sluggishness' if something needs to be woken up, even though you're plugged in on full power. as the autotune applies to all states...

power-profiles-daemon doesn't allow very granular editing of things so you may want to check out tlp (you'll have to disable powerprofiles daemon)

but yeah' glad it worked out overall

[u/jonstoppable → u/Liminal_Echo]

ah that's kinda high i think, for idling. i wonder if the rtx500 isnt going to sleep

if you're idling, it should be using the intel igpu, yes?

(you can run lspci | grep -i nvidia to see what number the dgpu is, but apparently they're usually 01)

cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:01\:00.0/power_state

(if it says D0, the nvidia card is fully awake and drawing power)

[u/Liminal_Echo → u/jonstoppable]

Looks like the Nvidia card is asleep and the power draw is way down now.