+1 on powertop, i have use it successfully for tunning old macs that I have upcycled with Linux and difference is day & night.
+1 on powertop, i have use it successfully for tunning old macs that I have upcycled with Linux and difference is day & night.
powertop helps a lot, I went from 3-4 hours to 6-7 hours on a ThinkPad. That said, it's not something you would want to bother a regular user with. E.g. enabling powertop optimizations will enable USB autosuspend, this will add a delay every darn time you didn't touch your USB keyboard or mouse for a second. So, you end up writing udev rules that excludes certain HID devices (or using different settings for when a laptop is on power or not), etc.
These are the kinds of optimizations that macOS does out of the box and you cannot expect most Linux users to do (which is one of the reasons battery life is so bad on Linux out-of-the-box).
I agree. The trick is to use powertop's suggestions to craft good udev rules, not to enable the powertop optimizations daemon directly. That doesn't work well in many scenarios. Someone should create a udev rule hardware database, or a udev rule generator for laptops and desktops to help common users.