Laptop battery life

Project Discussion
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Recently I have noticed the battery life on my laptop running Fedora Silverblue is dreadful. I mostly use it as a portable desktop, but it would be nice to be able to use it more than an hour or so on the battery when needed. Now either my laptop’s battery has suddenly degraded incredibly, or Fedora is not doing a good job at power management. This was however something that Fedora focused on for the 30 release so I am quite surprised.

Is this a general Fedora issue or is it worse on Silverblue? If so, what can be done about it? Does anyone else experience this too? Any recommendations on how to increase battery life?

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I can’t compare with a regular Fedora 30, but I have noticed the same thing on my laptop between Fedora Silverblue 30 and Fedora 29.

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Have you tried monitoring your CPU usage? IME random daemons that sometimes go haywire in the background can hurt battery.

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I have not tried any monitoring yet. Installing stuff like TLP is increasingly being discouraged so I have not done so. I don’t feel like I’m running anything really consuming except for Firefox. Even putting the screen at lowest brightness and in airplane mode does not help much. Looks like this problem might mostly be hardware related though:

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full = 2344000
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design = 7894000

If this is right I have less than 30% of the original capacity left, which would explain the quick draining…

Any recommendations for an easy way to monitor? E.g. without going all the way down the rabbit hole.Looked at Gnome’s system monitor and top, but no not notice any very CPU demanding processes. I sometimes wonder what effects all of this containerization has on all of it though…

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Oof, that does seem like the culprit, especially if nothing else is visibly causing battery issues. I’d say to recheck the value to see if it fluctuates, though, since they aren’t always correct.

I guess this isn’t as useful now, but I personally use the GNOME system-monitor extension so I can keep tabs on my overall CPU usage.

Also,

Actually, pretty much nothing. A lot of the attraction of containers is that you get plenty of isolation without the extra overhead of a VM. Afaik a podman container basically just consists of bash running inside and the conmon helper process, and a Flatpak just has the small bubblewrap sandbox wrapper and the D-Bus proxy.

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