I recently purchased a new laptop and decided to set up a dual boot with Fedora. However, upon starting Fedora, I noticed a significant drain on my battery. For example, on Windows using battery power, I can work for up to 3-4 hours, maybe even more, for tasks like listening to music on Spotify and browsing the web. On the other hand, without any active tasks, my battery drops to 10 percent within just 30 minutes.
I am not inclined to purchase a desktop solely for Linux use, and I also want to avoid wearing down my battery. How can I resolve this issue?
Any when this problem for GNU/Linux will be solved?
NOTE: In my old laptop I had also the same problem but I don’t want to use it anymore.
My specs:
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System Information
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System Manufacturer: LENOVO
BIOS: UEFI
Processor: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700HX (24 CPUs), ~2.1GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16124MB RAM
Microsoft Graphics Hybrid: Supported
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Display Devices
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Chip type: Intel(R) UHD Graphics Family
DAC type: Internal
Chip type: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
This happens even in power saving mode. I don’t remember the exact kernel, but I think it’s newer than 6.0.0.
Are you using the default install or have you also installed the nvidia drivers from the rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-drivers repo? The rpmfusion repo is one that is enabled if you enabled the 3rd party repos during the initial boot setup. If not already enabled it may be enabled by opening up the gnome-software app and select the repos from the “hamburger” menu in the upper right corner.
If you are using the default config then the only driver for the nvidia GPU is nouveau and it does not yet support the RTX 4060 and does not support hardware acceleration on any nvidia GPU. This forces the cpu to excessive load by the necessity of handling the graphics rendering and thus extreme power demand. The nvidia drivers support hardware acceleration and greatly reduce the load on the CPU.
Please post the output of dnf list installed \*nvidia\*
I was not loaded the nvidia kernels…it was a fresh install. Sadly, I have deleted the Fedora from hardware. However, when Fedora 39 comes, I ll try to install it again and use it. I ll then load the nvidia drivers and see share the results. Do you also think that there will be a difference between battery time and DE/WM choice ? For instance will be there will be a difference if I use Gnome or Sway ?
Probably no significant difference in power usage. The biggest difference to me seems the driver in use for the nvidia gpu and the load on the CPU caused by using the nouveau driver vs the nvidia driver.