What is Reddit's opinion of PowerTOP?

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Nightmare, even with tools like PowerTOP or TLP it's still not powerful as MacOS or MS Windows. It's not only Ubuntu BTW, Linux in general is bad when it becomes to battery life. I hope they do something about it in the next few years..because most people who use Linux systems they also use it on a Laptop/Notebook.

> Listing of hardware and software about how much power they comsume

https://01.org/powertop/ (lists software by power usage in first tab, hardware in second, iirc.)

> Manage applications (e.g. torrent client) by (wifi) connection so you don't eat up your data if you use you phone as a hotspot

Not exactly sure what you mean by this, but for example Trojita limits network usage depending on what kind of connection you're on.

Assuming suspend on lid is configured correctly. Try installing powertop and check the tunables section, you might find a bunch of BADs. I remember seeing the same on a Asus laptop with ubuntu and after flipping some of those BADs to GOODs the battery was lasting way longer than originally when in suspend. I haven’t find a way to save the configuration so every reboot I have to set it up again but as long as you just suspend you should be good to go again.

• get a minimalist distro, like crunchbang to get started with simple setup, instead of stripping down existing one
• try updating to most recent kernel available, due to ongoing power management improvements
• tweak for low power consumption - powertop will drop a lot of tweaks you can apply to your installation ( https://01.org/powertop , http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/638380-powertop-finds-power-hogs-on-your-linux-pc )
• add cpu frequency scaling, e.g. the ondemand cpu governor.
• install laptop-mode tools ( http://www.samwel.tk/laptop_mode/ ) , pretty much any distro has them available.

for simplicity, you can make user profiles or desktop sessions that will boot straight into specific application without any desktop. e.g. for kids you might make a firefox only session, for xbmc a xbmc only session, and so on.

Well thank god for that, because we've certainly never had anything that's done that before. Adding social media and silly web crap to power consumption metrics is a pretty big, innovative leap forward I'd say.

Trackpad options are with Synaptics

For Skype, probably try RPM Fusion. You should have these anyway, both free and non-free.

Never looked into your 4th point.

Battery life and general ops will be much better after installing Powertop. I believe it's in the F20 repos.

Have you ever tried using Intel PowerTOP? It can easily boost the battery by 20%+. You can permanently change some of the settings by copying over the command into something like rc.local and other settings need to be tweaked every time that you go into battery mode or wakeup.

Tu peux utiliser powertop. Il faudra le faire tourner durant quelques instants pour le calibrer, mais ensuite tu peux générer des rapports en HTML ou en CSV.

Mais garde a l'esprit que tout outil de mesure de consommation directement dans l'OS est biaisé. Tu perd potentiellement toutes les déperditions d'énergie de l'alim, et il y a des approximations faites sur certains composants.

Purtroppo limitare l'uso della batteria e' una cosa che spesso richiede attenzione speciale dato che molte distro fanno girare una quantita' di demoni assurda e le pagine web scaricano chilate di javascript sulle nostre CPU. Dipende quindi molto dalla distro e dal tipo di uso, comunque immagino tu ti riferisca anche al consumo delle operazioni scientifiche. Se riprovi una distro GNU/Linux ti raccomando l'uso di powertop un'applicazioncina della Intel che misura molto bene il consumo e cosa lo causa.

Piu' in generale sulla varieta' delle distro credo che la tendenza naturale sia quella della specializzazione, perche' una distro generica che copre "TUTTO" finisce per confondere ed affollare lo schermo con troppe scelte. In dyne:bolic ho sempre tenuto un approccio "opinionated" (scelgo io l'app che ritengo migliore per ogni ruolo) e cio' ha aiutato molto l'usabilita' del prodotto.

Per esempio noto con piacere il successo di una distro italiana: ParrotOS che e' specializzata per forensica e fornisce tante applicazioni spesso difficili da trovare e da compilare e configurare, pronte per l'uso. Anche rispetto alla sicurezza, isolare ambienti diversi e' meglio, senza rischiare di inquinare i risultati di una ricerca con un malware entrato dalla mail o dal browsing sui social...

Insomma non sono d'accordo che fare un conglomerato di 3-4 grandi sia la cosa migliore si per chi fa che per chi usa distro GNU/Linux. Quel che puo' essere utile e che cerchiamo di fare con Devuan e' una distro "base" e minimale che faciliti la creazione di distro specializzate, per questo in Devuan incoraggiamo la diversita' e facilitiamo la creazione di derivate grazie ad un SDK scritto ad uopo.

Volume sucks too, there's a reason the OS allows 150% volume. Most people with laptops run this:

PowerTop
and
TLP

I'm on the UX330 on 16.04 and its been great. I did install newer Kabylake firmware found here and Powertop to tame energy consumption.

I'd expect a really minimalist Linux distro to be the worst, because of missing 3D and video acceleration, missing GPU power management etc.

If you get a popular distro, and invest some time in configuring it - with proper video drivers, hardware video decoding working, all powertop recommended options enabled, maybe you'd shave 1-2 watts, but that's nothing compared to simply getting a hardware designed to be more power efficient.

You can try to underclock your CPU in BIOS, but again, I wouldn't expect much savings. Modern hardware already use frequency scaling to save power when idle. And you may find out, that doing a job at lower frequency for a longer amount of time uses more energy in total than switching to a higher clock and finishing it faster.

Have you tried powertop? When you run it it reports on your usage, and has a section called tunables. Depending on the distro it can make quite a difference.

Configuring the fixes is done differently by different distros. For a Slackware-based distro all I had to do was copy the commands into rc.local and it ran them all at boot. With a systemd-based distro it uses a completely different scheme, of course.

Set your brightness low.
Check the suggestions from powertop after installing it.
Other tweaks for Ubuntu with Unity.

there's chromium os, but you probably need to build everything yourself. and even then you will most likely not find the power savings that windows can give out of the box. you can tweak debian, probably with a tool like https://01.org/powertop. same goes for the touch screen.