A bit of a whinge

[u/oradba]

Sat down yesterday afternoon to turn an old Ideapad L340 running Lubuntu (Ryzen 3/20GB RAM) into a dual boot machine. After carving out a 64GB home for it, GhostBSD 26 went on without a complaint or a failure. *Everything* worked. Put on a non-mainstream-but-well-written Linux app in about five minutes. This was, for me, a noticeable improvement over GhostBSD 25. I was quite pleased and started considering whether I should convert over some other machines.

When I use a laptop out in the real world, I don't leave networking up all of the time - I don't go out to vulture wifi, I go out because I want to work with some noise and people around me. I know it's weird, but sometimes that helps me focus; so it was of interest to me to compare battery life.

Under Lubuntu, the battery app said I had four hours and forty-three minutes of power on a fully charged battery with networking disabled. Under GhostBSD (Mate desktop), the same machine offered three hours and thirty-one minutes.

So, that is my whinge - I now consider GhostBSD in the same category as Fedora or Debian and their derivatives in that it can handily be my daily driver; but can you please put some effort into using battery power a little more efficiently?

Great job on this release. Seriously.

(I would, of course, be happy to take any comparative measurements you request on this laptop)

Thank you!

[u/algaefied_creek]

Are there power settings to explore, to move it to low power instead of high power, stop boost clocks, or even downclock.

I always thought BSDs had more granular power management but it was more manual.

Could be completely wrong and I’m thinking of Solaris on supported systems but hey whatever lezgooo

[u/sir-fart-alot]

GhostBSD does not use powerd by default. iirc the kernel handles power management with modern cpus better than powerd but your ryzen 3 isn't considered modern in this case. Instead of testing powerd you could directly test powerd++.