envycontrol VS System76 Power Management

You're probably looking for envycontrol ... it will allow you to switch back and forth between integrated/hybrid/dedicated-only graphics as needed. I used this on my 2023 Legion Slim 5 and it made a huge difference in power consumption. Now I only enable dedicated if I need it for something specific, which is rare for me. Computer generally sips between 16w-20w doing basic browsing tasks, with no other optimizations performed (this is on Fedora Silverblue)

Install EnvyControl, which is a useful package that can offload applications to the integrated GPU and turn off the dedicated Nvidia GPU. This will add a few hours at least to your battery life. Distro-specific instructions: https://github.com/bayasdev/envycontrol

Check out this video. https://youtu.be/Pn2iUgW3l6w . It's how I setup my graphics card. You could also use envy control https://github.com/bayasdev/envycontrol.

Now, it's much easier to enable the Fusion repository and Envycontrol makes it as easy as Ubuntu to switch GPUs! I also use DisplayLink for additional monitors and there is now a 3rd party rpm for that.

use envycontrol

I thus played a bit with https://github.com/bayasdev/envycontrol which is listed on the archwiiki, the problem is that now, even when selecting the "nvidia" mode and even when going back to "discret graphics" in the bios I'm encountering bugs I didn't have before, mainly SDDM being really zoomed, i3 borders being HUGE (while the rest is normal, I didn't change my config so it's likely not a DPI problem there), glitches when I first login with polybar duplicating itself and the wallpaper being broken, requiring to refresh i3 to have those 2 things fixes, picom animations are also super glitchy.

See: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power

Also refer to https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power/issues/153 for setting environment variables and making simple scripts with it.

One example would be, I had problems with running native version of Substance Designer. And it had something to do with always using GPU or setting environment variables(https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power/issues/153). But I wouldn't know what to look for if a random guy on a forum didn't tell me to use it with NVIDIA Graphics.

[Update 2022-02-21] It appears that there are two packages, System76-io-dkms and System76-power. From what I gather only the first is necessary. I'm not sure how to install third-party DKMS modules that are not in the official repos. The official Void documentation on this topic is sparse, is there somewhere I can look this up?

Initially it only worked with Intel CPUs but it seems it supports AMD APUs now according to this Github issue https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power/issues/73

system76-power

The performance modes are going to affect how much power the system is using (and thus how much heat it's generating), not the fan curves directly. Those profiles are defined in the system76-power application, source code here: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power/blob/master/src/daemon/profiles.rs

The script uses udev rules that are run at specific kernel events. It creates one rule for when the Laptop switches to battery power and another for when the Laptop switches to wall power. Both rules run system76-power while providing one of the available power profiles as an argument. I went with battery and balanced respectively.

Try the fix listed here: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power/issues/358