Higher power draw on Kinoite 40 w/ Wayland

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1

Hello everyone!

I installed Fedora Kinoite 40 on my laptop with integrated graphics, I removed power-tools-daemon to replace it with tlp. All goes well, however, I noticed that the power draw is a little bit higher than what I would like. I am measuring power usage with a plug. I consume around 4 watts on idle on an empty desktop. I can consume around 8 watts or even more during light regular usage.

Whereas on X11, I consume around 1.5 or 2 watts when idle, usage can vary, but generally lighter loads only consume 3 to 4 watts.

All is good and well, until I learned on the web that Wayland is supposed to have better battery life and lower power draw than X11!

And here, I am totally confused. I tried to look at powertop to see if nothing abnormal was going on, but I couldn’t see anything shocking.

I don’t know who the culprit is. It could be my intel graphics card drivers, it could be kde, it could be a rogue background process that only runs on wayland, maybe wayland’s fractional scaling is more expensive than on x11? Maybe TLP does not run as efficiently on x11 than on wayland?

Can any kind soul help me on how I could possibly troubleshoot this problem and find the culprit(s)?

2

Added kde-plasma, power-management, tlp and removed kde

3

F40 Kinoite should not have a Wayland session. To what are you comparing this?

Did you try with power-profiles-daemon still in the system?

4

It defaulted to Wayland out of the box right after install, x11 wasn’t installed.

It’s still a similar story, still higher power draw on Wayland compared to x11.
(However, my watt usage on stock ppd is higher than with my tuned tlp regardless of the window session.)

5

Okay so you tested also before using TLP and had higher power draw?

Note that Fedora with Plasma runs tons of stuff in the background, among that XWayland for X11 apps and XWaylandVideobridge for random screen recording apps without support for Wayland.

I found no way to stop these extra things from running (among geoclue, discovernotifier, accessibility) which is really annoying.

So with XWayland it actually runs XOrg AND Wayland.