...

For university, I usually switch between an Apple Silicon MacBook and a ThinkPad T480s (it runs Arch, btw). The MacBook is my usual choice for long days, because its battery life is just unbeatable (~6-8 hours depending on the type of usage). Unfortunately, even for short days with 1-2 lectures, my beloved ThinkPad was struggling to get through them, only lasting at most 3 hours.

Because I want to use my ThinkPad more, especially since I daily-drive a similar setup (Niri + Quickshell) on my Desktop and the keybinds are part of my muscle memory now, I tried to look into optimizing the battery life.

Tools to optimize battery life on Linux

To research the available tools, I used two primary sources: Reddit and the Arch Wiki. Both gave me various options on how to optimize battery life, which I was able to narrow down to a few options to consider:

• To examine your battery usage and run some basic optimizations, you can use Powertop
• A tool which easily allows various tweaks regarding power profiles, limiting battery charge and much more is TLP. It implements Powertop suggestions as its default, so Powertop will only be useful if you want to make further manual tweaks.
• For ThinkPads specifically, there is throttled, which allows you to apply more advanced tweaks such as undervolting to prevent thermal throttling.

While browsing Reddit, I have also found a Medium article outlining some more advanced techniques to tweak your battery life (and it also includes some explanations of TLP settings).

My choices

I wanted to keep it very simple, so I just went with TLP and TLP-UI to quickly make tweaks. These are the main settings that will hopefully help with my battery life:

• Set power saving profile as default
• Disable WOL (Wake on LAN). This is a default setting, but needs the ethtool package to be installed on Arch.
• Set CPU scaling governor to power save
• Set the maximum CPU performance to 75% on battery
• Disabled "turbo boost" and dynamic boost on battery
• For battery health purposes, limit battery charge to 80%

Other than that, I just went with the defaults of TLP since they already seem to be configured quite well.

Further things to try

I am hoping that this setup will help with my battery life and allow me to use my ThinkPad more often at uni. If it still doesn't help enough, I have two things I want to try to further improve battery life and CPU throttling.

Firstly, I would attempt to use throttled to undervolt the CPU. I didn't go for it yet because it seemed a bit more risky and it needs a bit of tweaking to adjust parameters for a stable config.

Secondly, since the ThinkPad is a bit old, repasting the CPU or swapping the fan/heatsink might help a bit with overheating and very loud fan noises which I've been encountering in some cases. This is not related directly to battery life but would also improve my experience significantly.