X200 and battery save
Hi guys, I've just received my Thinkpad X200 from gluglug and I have few questions:
What desktop enviroment do you suggest for battery save ? I'm not so enthusiast about LXDE because he missses some feature as a complete DE, is gnome fallback good because It doesn't require 3d accelaration ? And MATE / cinnamon / KDE with effects turned off ?
I've searched a lot but data I've found are controversial.
I'm going to choose TLP over laptop-mode-tools, do you agree ?
THank you all
In my experience, TLP was worse than laptop-mode-tools (made it hotter, but then again it wasn't an X200)
I suggest you try these and see which of them performs better: http://itsfoss.com/reduce-overheating-laptops-linux/
I have an Libreboot X60s from gluglug and run Xfce as my DE. More lightweight than Gnome on these older machines but suffciently configurable if not more than Gnome/KDE etc. to satisfy most needs.
Here's a few tips https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/optimizing-battery-time
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XFCE is pretty lightweight. You may want to give it a try.
the best thing for battery life i found on the x200 was just to turn the screen brightness down
Yes, I've also noticed that... screen brightness has a very huge impact.
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Yeah, this goes for all laptops.
Do you think that upgrading the kernel will have any impact?
Currently I'm running
3.13.0-55-generic
Thank you!
It doesn't hurt to try :)
Let me know if you get power savings with the newest kernel.
Somewhat off-topic: I upgraded from 3.13.0-55 to 3.13.0-57, and autoremoved
(which did appear to remove some old kernel packages), but for some reason both
entries existed concurrently for a bit in grub.cfg, even though it
update-grubbed at the end of the autoremoval process. The second entry (0-55)
only disappeared when I updated GRUB myself. Weird.
Story time: The only reason this even came to my attention is that the computer
apparently had a violent overheat; the screen went static (as in, CRT static)
and the fans started blowing to the max. My computer had never seriously heated
up or overheated before, even during 48-hour marathon sessions. My computer was
left unusable, so I panic-BRBed it and ran with it to the kitchen where it's
nice and cool. When I rebooted (despite the fact I have GRUB set to skip the
menu) the menu showed up with all the (two) options (a la 'Windows failed to
shut down properly'). Nothing of the sort has happened since (the GRUB
weirdness or the hardware weirdness). So there.
I'm pretty sure screen brightness goes for every monitor connected to batteries as the only power source.
Don't use compiz. It's garbage and takes up a lot of CPU, especially for how simple it is.
Go to system settings -> Window manager and effects and change to Metacity.