I recently made the switch from Linux Mint Cinnamon to Fedora KDE, and I'm really struggling with battery life. It dropped from an estimated 14 hours on Mint to just 4 hours on Fedora! I've already installed the NVIDIA drivers and TLP, but TLP doesn't seem to help at all. Can anyone shed some light on why this might be happening? I'm seriously considering going back to Mint, but I really like the look of KDE. My laptop is an Acer Swift X 16 with an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS and a GeForce RTX 3050 GPU. When I checked with `lspci`, it shows both an integrated AMD GPU and the discrete NVIDIA GPU. The software monitor indicates everything is using the NVIDIA GPU, but `switcherooctl` says the iGPU is set as the default. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
4 Answers
It sounds like you're facing some common issues when switching desktop environments. KDE can be more resource-intensive compared to Cinnamon, so that might explain the decrease in battery life. Also, TLP usually provides minimal benefits; sometimes modern power management tools in the kernel are enough on their own. You may want to consider tools that manage GPU power or utilize NVIDIA Optimus features more effectively.
I think it's crucial to note that battery estimates can be misleading. It's also possible that both systems are reporting inaccurate estimates. That said, if Mint seems to handle power better for you, you could always just install KDE on it instead of staying on Fedora. Just a thought!
Fedora probably uses upower for battery management. You might want to tweak some settings to improve battery performance. There’s a great README on it that could help you get better battery life.
It's unusual for your system to default to the discrete GPU for everything. Check your BIOS settings—make sure the integrated GPU is set to be active by default. You might want to run on X11 instead of Wayland, as it can sometimes be better for power management. But if you need stability for class, just stick with Mint for now!
Thanks for the tip! I’ll look into those settings to see if I can optimize things better.