Battery overuse in Mint Cinnamon

Kamran

New Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2019
Messages
7
Reaction score
0
Credits
0
I am using Linux Mint Cinnamon on my Lenovo Ideapad 151 since past 6-months. I have noted that since I installed Mint on my system its battery run out time has decreased. Initially I thought it was because my battery was getting older but the other day I read that it was a known problem with Mint. Someone was saying that his battery was giving 5-hrs on Windows but only 2-hrs on Mint. So is it really a problem with Mint? What others have to say about this?
 


G'day Kamran, and welcome to linux.org

Which Linux mint are you running ?....in software manager you should find a program called TLP

Install that and note any differences.

Source...HERE
 
G'day @Kamran and welcome to linux.org :)

Cinnamon, which is Linux Mint's flagship, is the most resource-hungry DE (desktop environment), compared to MATE and Xfce.

That being said, I am not aware of the problems but they are documented elsewhere.

A search on Google using keywords

linux cinnamon battery usage

revealed this article from 2019

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=287988

so you may want to install tlp and give it a try, you can do it through Synaptic Package Manager or with


Code:
sudo apt-get install tlp

Wizard
 
Brian beat me to it, I see.

I would advocate taking a Timeshift snapshot before and after.

Wiz
 
Thanks to both Condobloke and Wizardfromoz.

l'll sure give it a try and report back. I do hope that tlp will solve the problem. By the way, would you recommend switching to some other distro. I use linux Mint on my laptop as the main OS ad only need to work on Office suite (I use LibreOffice). I am not for high end graphics and image editing.

Thanks again for your help.

Kamran.
 
I would seldom recommend to anyone to switch away from Mint, it is such a good distro, but you could try MATE version or Xfce.

Other than that, at terminal

Code:
inxi -Fxz

will give us your PC specs, if you want to provide, and we can explore further options.

Wizard out for my Saturday night

Avagudweegend
 
Update:
Thanks for the help. I have installed TLP with Synaptic Manager. Now how do I configure it or does it work out of box?
 


(instructions etc for Ubuntu will more than likely be fine for linux mint, because Linux mint is based on Ubuntu)
 
Last edited:


(instructions etc for Ubuntu will more than likely be fine for linux, because Linux is based on Ubuntu)

Yes I am sure these should work fine for Mint as well. Anyway, I shall update you on this.

Thanks again for your help.

Kamran.
 
Thanks LeoR for your kind help.

Update:
I installed TLP 3 days back but I have noticed that since I installed the app the performance has slowed down and also LibreOffice has started behaving weirdly -- it takes long time in starting print preview and sometimes is unable to restore previously saved files. Is there some tweaking required to get past this issue?
 
Thanks LeoR for your kind help.

Update:
I installed TLP 3 days back but I have noticed that since I installed the app the performance has slowed down and also LibreOffice has started behaving weirdly -- it takes long time in starting print preview and sometimes is unable to restore previously saved files. Is there some tweaking required to get past this issue?

Have you done any changes in TLP or did you just install it? TLP itself does not speed up your system, your settings will. I set up the CPU speed on AC power to Conservative instead of the default Powersave - made an impressive difference in speed. CPU speed jumped from 800MHz to 2100-2500MHz. I did this with TLPUI, which is very easy to use.
 
No I didn't make any changes but after reading your message I think it is probably due to these default settings that I am seeing the weird behavior. If I do change the settings as you have described don't you think it will kill the very reason that I installed TLP for. Perhaps, this is how TLP works, by decreasing the CPU speed to conserve power.
 
No I didn't make any changes but after reading your message I think it is probably due to these default settings that I am seeing the weird behavior. If I do change the settings as you have described don't you think it will kill the very reason that I installed TLP for. Perhaps, this is how TLP works, by decreasing the CPU speed to conserve power.

I'm not sure, but I think TLP does not change _anything_ at all by just installing it. You have to manually do every change in TLP to make it active. Depending on how much power you want to save, you will loose performance - thats the deal. I prefer to run my laptop with AC power almost all time, so I have speeded i up instead of slowing down. Still I have CPU setting for battey operation as Powersave, which will slow down performance in that case.
 
How long does your battery last ?
 
Well! What I have read about TLP is that it works by resetting some of default Linux settings and it does this by default after installation and then restart. All these default settings of TLP can be adjusted according to one's needs. Being quite a nerd in Linux I dare not change any of these settings on my own.

As for the time of battery run-out, it was somewhere near 5 hrs on Windows 10 and about 3 to 3.5 hrs on Linux Mint and somewhat better after TLP but I cannot yet quantify it.
 


Latest posts

Top