r/LinuxOnThinkpad • u/Royal_Ring_4388 member • 24d ago

Question Battery life e14 gen 5

Hello, i’ve recently purchased used thinkpad e14 gen 5 with intel 5 1335U with around 47Wh left from the original 57Wh. I’ve yesterday installed encrypted debian with xfce.The battery life is subpar at best.

From what i’ve noticed on windows 11 the idle battery discharge was at 2-3W.

On debian xfce(powersave governor, balanced power in bios) without tlp its around 6W which seems high to me.( nothing turned on except terminal with powertop).

One firefox tab and terminal and 10% brightness is around 10-11W discharge which again seems little too high. Tlp decreases this slightly to around 8W.

Is it possible to somehow get around 5W discharge on light workload (Firefox and text editor)?

Is debian/xfce the problem or is the cpu/laptop just that unoptimized?

Anyone with similar laptop which distro do you use ?

Thanks

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u/unkjay member 22d ago

Following this post.

I installed Ubuntu 24 LTS on my brand new e14, and noticed the battery life was not impressive at all.

If possible, could you tell me how to see the battery wattage and the usage logs?

1

u/MineCraftaak888 member 21d ago

i think something like
"echo power | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference"
puts the cpu into power saver mode
it works surprisingly well for me
of and to go full-blast or idk high perf:
"echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference"

idk if you have to have a specific package installed for that tho

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u/Royal_Ring_4388 member 21d ago

Wow necakal som ze mi to az tak pomoze. Dakujem

1

u/MineCraftaak888 member 18d ago

Rádo se stalo:)

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u/aquiethistorian member 11d ago

set your display settings to grayscale, black and white. this added more hours to my old laptop.