I have a Framework 13 running Ubuntu 23.04. I have been using TLP and it really improved battery life. I followed the original (and updated) Optimization Guide. Everything works great, except…
When I’m on battery mode, the “change workspace” gesture in Gnome+Wayland becomes _painfully slow_. Using the arrow keys to change workspaces behaves normally, but specifically the three-fingered swipe to change workspaces is stuttery and slow. This only happens with TLP enabled and on battery. I’ve modified Graphics, PCIe, and Processor settings to no avail; I have even created exceptions for the ven:id in USB settings. It seems like the system requirements to perform that animation requires too much scaling for a single thread!
Any suggested workarounds? Anyone else experiencing this? It isn’t a big deal, just a bummer.
Thanks!
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Frankly, regardless of what the optimization guide says, I would not use TLP. TLP is widely known in the Linux community for being very troublesome in this respect. Your CPU scheduler very likely does a much better job anyway, and TLP needs to be specifically fine-tuned for a machine to work well. Personally, I think the performance penalty you pay for TLP is not worth the battery life advantage. Sure, my laptop lasts longer on TLP, but it’s also slower - not rocket science, right? If you put the brakes on your CPU, it will run slower and draw less power. Seems about right.
I would try one of the following options:
- Drop TLP completely, and use
power-profiles-daemonspluspowertopand go work on some of the tunables to turn off features you don’t need to gain more power - Tweak your TLP config yourself. Make sure Turbo Boost is allowed, and edit the CPU-related parameters to be less conservative. You may keep the USB device suspend stuff alone if you want.
- Use Fedora Workstation and don’t do anything else. It already has pretty good defaults for battery life and, on all hardware I tested, it gives me longer battery run-time than Ubuntu and Arch do on a comparable configuration. Make sure to stick to GNOME on Wayland and avoid installing extensions - some of them are programmed so badly that they end up consuming a lot of power unnecessarily.
Also, make sure you are starting up Linux with
mem_sleep_default=deepto minimize power drain during standby; although, as with all modern laptops except MacBooks nowdays, you should standby as little as you can and prefer a full shutdown whenever feasible.Performance has been great, honestly: on battery or AC! TLP has made a massive difference for me, providing far greater battery life at very little cost to performance. That said, this is the only noticeable issue I’ve really had (besides for other Wayland annoyances).
I do have Intel, and PPD provided subpar performance IMO. That said, I might go back to it as a test.
- Drop TLP completely, and use
Have you tried changing CPU_MAX_PERF_ON_BAT from 30 to 100? That setting would throttle your CPU to 30% of the turbo clock speed, which is around 1.3GHz. You should also try upgrading your operating system. GNOME 45 and its packages may improve performance, along with the newer graphics drivers in the 23.10 repositories.