powertop VS arch-basic

powertop is just relaying whatever value my laptop's battery is reporting for consumption, read from sysfs[0]. Are you suggesting my laptop's battery is merely estimating current and/or voltage? I don't know much about the hardware in my laptop's battery, and I'm not succeeding in finding information online, but I'm going to need a source to believe that considering how trivial it would be for the battery to report real values for current and voltage.

[0] https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/blob/master/src/measure...

If you're certain your GPU has deeper power saving states than P8, I would start by checking why it's not using them. Maybe tlp, powertop or nvtop (or their documentation) can help.

The only Linux tool for this I've even heard of is powertop , which OP mentioned, but it looks nontrivial to build (kernel patches are mentioned).

It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup.

Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain tunings from auto-tune as well, but

https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116

Would running auto-cpufreq and powertop be a better combination to avoid installing XFCE4 dependencies? I don't play a lot of games or do a ton of compiling, but when I need to, I would like to be able to get as much out of the hardware as I can.

Recommend looking for an open bug report here for the same issue, and if nobody else has opened one you can file one yourself to get support/get the issue fixed in a patch.

`powertop --auto-tune` can set some settings to "good", but it may in fact be counterproductive, e.g. setting USB to autosuspend that suspends a mouse that shouldn't be, etc. See here for more info. In my experience/research, it doesn't really do much.

For me it wasn't efficient by default. I use powertop and auto-cpufreq

It may be found at GitHub.

After becoming familiar with the process, I adapted some scripts from this and EF Linux to take care of just about everything after partitioning, encrypting, and mounting.

I currently work on a laptop, but upgraded my tower PC nearly two months ago (sigh) and want to move back to using it. But I don't want to spend much time working on two computers; The laptop for referencing issues on the tower PC while setting up. So I'm trying to clean up my dotfiles into a nice, neat little package to be able to use stow, writing a cheeky installation script based on Ermanno's example, and preparing to use DWM over BSPWM.