How Red Hat is Improving Battery Life on Linux

[Embridioum]

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/bett ... dora-linux

Hans de Goede from Red Hat has worked on these four power management tweaks that improved battery life on Fedora:

Enabling auto-suspend for USB Bluetooth
Enabling auto-suspend for Intel HDA codecs
Enabling SATA link PM by default
Enabling i915 Panel Self Refresh by default.

In his tests with these settings the idle power consumption of Fedora on a Lenovo ThinkPad T440s laptop dropped by 2 watts from ~7.9 Watts to ~5.6 watts.

I would love to see these changes in the next version of Mint as well.

[MichaelJohn]

I would love to see similar things done on many mobile phones!

[Pepi]

Don't want to start a flame-war but Fedora is one reason I gave up on Linux years ago. Maybe I need to revisit it

[Fred Barclay]

Maybe I need to revisit it

I did just that about 2 weeks ago, and I've been pleasantly surprised with Fedora 27 Cinnamon. I still like apt, or pacman, better than dnf though, at least for searching for packages in the repos..

Fedora doesn't ship packages that aren't free and open source, so if you don't want to spend a little time adding things like Chrome and codecs to watch videos, I'd recommend giving Korora a whirl - it's sort of the Mint of the Fedora world and comes with lots of extra packages so it should just work out-of-the-box. Actually, it comes with a little too much for my tastes.

[Hoser Rob]

Don't want to start a flame-war but Fedora is one reason I gave up on Linux years ago. Maybe I need to revisit it

I sympathize about Fedora. I installed it on my netbook once and soon discovered that the package manager didn't work. The forum gurus said it was my fault because I didn't read the bugzillas. What sort of idiot thinks I'm going to install a Linux distro knowiing the package manager is broken???

However it's Red Hat, not Fedora, that was cited. They're not the same. RHEL is much more conservative, and Fedora users are basically RHEL beta testers. And of course since RHEL is a true enterprise distro and as such isn't free, you get to talk to actual tech support people who are obligated to solve your problems.

I'm sure that stuff will end up in Mint but not before it's adopted by Ubuntu. Which I'm sure will happen ... Red Hat is becoming more influential all the time.

[Portreve]

My very first exposure ever to GNU+Linux was about 1997 or so and RedHat 4.2. This, of course, was before they turned into a B2B distro. When that happened, they split off a version which became Fedora Core.

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I was a big fan of the early versions of Fedora Core, but this was still back at a point in time when I couldn't do anything productive on it. The software hadn't either come into existence yet, or wasn't mature enough yet, for my needs. Also, at that time I was relatively ill-informed about a great many things (outside the world of technology, many of them political, philosophical, etc., and so not appropriate for discussion here on LMF) and as such I was still running Mac OS, and then later Mac OS X. From the late 90s through the early/mid 2000s, I had gotten into and built a number of x86 boxes, for myself, friends, and co-workers, and that was a lot of fun, though at the time I was generally putting some version of Windows on them.

Yes, it's true: I've also run Windows, though my primary platform was always Mac OS / Mac OS X.
</tangent>

To my understanding, RedHat and the Fedora Project have always been good about upstreaming their stuff, and once this gentleman's work has been fully validated and is considered ready, I have no doubt it'll be upstreamed, at which point Debian, Ubuntu, and anyone else out there will probably take a look at it and decide to include it. So while it's true that this can be a slow and sometimes annoying process, it ensures any changes get vetted numerous times and are made available for universal distribution. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.

[Pepi]

Sounds like a winter project. Time for more testing