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If your laptop has dual GPUs (Intel integrated and nVidia discrete), the battery life should improve a lot if you disable the nVidia when you’re not using the extra performance it provides. If you have an icon in the system tray (which it should in Mint on an Optimus/Prime model), you should be able to turn off the nVidia GPU using that.
That’s right, it has both, so, following your suggestion, I switched to the Intel GPU using the icon in the system tray.
I’ve never tried to use the Nouveau driver with my G3 (which has this type of dual GPU setup), as its performance is poor compared to the nVidia driver (and I didn’t buy the gaming laptop to not have good performance), so I don’t know how well it works with the dual GPU setup.
When I booted the computer for the 1st after installing Mint, I had a problem with the cursor freezing, and I could not work out why. I uninstalled/reinstalled about 3 times without any change. Then I thought (boy, those newbie brainwaves !!) let’s have a look at the drivers, and in the window that opened up there was the Nouveau driver marked as active, and the Nvidia driver was recommended. I switched to the latter, and …. cursor problem disappeared. Boy, was I proud of myself
BTW, am I right to assume I don’t have to switch back to the Nouveau driver?
1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX
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@ek: many thanks for that. No, I did not know about TLPUI, I kept struggling with the app through the terminal. I downloaded and installed TLPUI immediately.
Thanks also for the file with your settings; I ‘ll have a look how I can use that
Sometimes it seems this “Linux forum” is more useful than specialised ones.
1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX
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@Ascaris: good to hear from you again, it’s been a while.
Many thanks for your help. Let me answer 1 or 2 issues you raised.
I installed Powertop 2.9 with Synaptic. Toggling through the various pages does not mean much to me, but when I got to the Tunables (on battery) I was glad to have your comments. I had 7 lines showing “bad”, 5 of which relating to “enable SATA link power management for host 0, 1, 2, 3, 4”. I toggles all of those to “good”. The other one was “VM writeback timeout”, even though I do not have a VM set-up. I toggled it to “good”. The last one was something about Nvidia (I have a Nvidia card), but after I toggled it to “good”, toggled through the other pages again then back to Tunables, the Nvidia line was gone.
As for my system: Mint 19.1 XFCE (I deleted Win 10), always haven a browser open (Firefox or Iridium), File Manager, Typora (a Markdown app), 1 or max 2 spreadsheets, Liferea (RSS feed reader), Autokey, Redshift, Battery Monitor, backlight at 38%. No heavy stuff at all. I have also set the native Mint power settings as best as I could – hence the backlight.
As for kernels, I don’t touch them because I am scared stiff to bork my machine. It is running well, and very stable. I have tried some other distros on the side, and with each one my appreciation for Mint rises. The only reason I look at others is because I want to ultimately have a rolling release, but that’s another story.
Regarding power management, I am not going into a sophisticated benchmark exercise, I just base myself on a subjective impression. I know that can be dangerous, but I am not worried about 30 minutes or even 1 hour. To me a battery life of 2 hours is far too low considering I don’t do anything particularly taxing. 6-7 hours seems to be an average for many people, so I would be happy if I could get to 4-5 hours; alright, even 3.5-4 hours would be a pleasing improvement for me.
Anyway, I am going to monitor it to see if there is a difference. BTW, sudo tlp-stat -s tells me TLP is running, although you said it might not be working. Hmmm.
1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX
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