Hi,
I really love using Clear Linux but there is one issue, the OS is much more energy consuming than for example ubuntu. Is there any way to make Clear Linux a bit more energy efficient? TLP worked fine for me on Debian based distros. Is there maybe any equivalent program relevant for Clear Linux?
Can you share the actual data that you have? Power is dependent on many factors like usage, system, and everything happening on the system. Without knowing the data, it’s impossible to make any claims or suggest ways to reduce power consumption.
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Thanks for your response.
How can I provide you with actual data? I just know, that especially using a browser is really energy expensive…
How did you measure this?
While using Ubuntu on my XPS 13 the battery brought me easily through one working day. Thats not the case anymore. While browsing the internet - I can literally see my battery percentage decreasing. That was not the case before…
Sorry - that might not sound like a very professional measuring method for you.
Have a look here :
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It’s fine - I understand.
Clearlinux is tuned for performance. We do not tune for making your battery life last as long as possible since that generally means you degrade performance enough that things are not enjoyable. You could start with changing the CPU governor but everything comes with downsides - it’s up to you to decide whether doing that is worth it or not - and hard data is the best way to decide.
There is also a large amount of hardware dependent factors in play, and we don’t have and can’t test on every piece of hardware. This means that we can’t see if your platform behaves badly or has BIOS settings that make it work much differently than we would normally expect. clr-power takes care of some of the issues, but still, there are many others.
I would suggest that if you really want to contribute useful data, you could very easily do this in many ways. For instance, you can disable screensaver & blanking and just let the system sit idle, and see how long it takes to drain the battery from 100% to 50%, and then repeat on the other OS. This already would be a relatively good measurement that would be reproducible.
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I was not aware, that you have to contribute useful data in order to pose questions in this forum…
You are not required to, at all.
However, it’s almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation about power consumption and performance without some sort of data to back up claims or refute them.
So, when users make a claim about power or performance, I don’t doubt them. I’m actually asking them to give me their data so we, at Intel, can maybe reproduce the issue here in the office and work on it.
It works to the benefit of everyone - the better data you give us, the better we can address the issue. If your data is “hard” (100% reproducable) then we can likely help everyone in the future with fixes to address the issues. If the data is “soft” (we have no idea how to reproduce it) then we can’t even start to address the issues because we have no idea how to see the issue in the first place.
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Dear Ahok,
I really appreciate your help. But when looking back to my original question: “is there any way to make Clear Linux a bit more energy efficient? TLP worked fine for me on Debian based distros. Is there maybe any equivalent program relevant for Clear Linux?” I have the feeling that you did not respond to my question but followed some kind of other narrative…
I see your point.
In your original message you had 2 parts. I replied to the first part (the statement that power consumption was higher) and ignored the second part entirely.
As for TLP - the request for it is valid. I do not think we’ll ever include it by default because it goes against our view on power&performance and we have other tools and methods, but, if people want to install it themselves then that is totally OK.
I will take a look and see if it can be packaged and bundled easily.
Hey Ahkok,
its not that I need to install TLP. I really enjoy the performance of Clearlinux. I was more interested, if there are any tricks to make the OS a bit more energy efficient. But if there is nothing popping up with you - OK with me. So please do not try to package TLP for me 
Too late! It’s already packaged. It’ll be in the TLP bundle and available in a few days. Perhaps it’ll work and make a small difference - please try it and let me know if at least it works.
Thanks Ahkok,
but won’t it be like using a car with the wrong gasoline?
I will for sure try it plus come back to you with “hard” data
I use Clear Linux on few laptops and I do not see any battery degradation. Even if it is there it should not be that visible.
I’m suggesting looking at htop/powertop all the time for a day. You should see a thread that uses significant CPU time. Also “browsing” is the most power consumer thing those days.
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You will likely impact performance and latency, so it may impact your experience. But it shouldn’t break anything - at least not intentionally.
Sounds not very tempting…
There’s always a trade off. TLP is a set of shell scripts that tune lots of bits that can affect hardware. We haven’t tested many of those, and it’s not a project that we maintain. Now, normally you’d expect the maintainers of these projects to respond to user problems and make adjustments, and I have no reason to believe they ignore those, but, again, we haven’t tested it before ourselves.
Try this command after booting:
echo powersave | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
This will not survive a reboot.
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