How to optimize the energy use of our laptop with TLP

There are certain settings that can be used to improve the use and duration of energy in our portable equipment, many of them are subject to the hardware characteristics as well as the distribution we use, that is where an advanced energy management system become a great ally.  TLP It will help us to apply those settings that we make on our computer automatically, keeping in mind the distro that we use and the hardware that we have, all this through command lines.

For those who know very little (or nothing) about BPD, it is nothing more than a advanced energy management tool, with which we can apply a series of adjustments or configurations so that our laptop can save energy when it is not plugged into an electricity source. This application could do everything automatically and in the background, but as I said before, it will depend on both the hardware and the software we have and it does not have a graphical interface.

There is another tool very similar to TLP, maybe you have ever worked with it "laptop-mode-tools", the recommendation is to remove it before using TLP so that we can avoid any conflict.

sudo apt-get purge laptop-mode-tools

After this we proceed to install. Users of distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint can install TLP directly from their official PPA with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa: linrunner / tlp

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tlp

Once we have the application installed, it will start automatically when your computer turns on but to avoid restarting the computer when we install it we can start it directly with this command

sudo tlp start

If you want to check that everything is in order with TLP and that it works correctly, use this command

sudo tlp stat

But there is still more, there are certain extra packages that can be very useful, such as:

Smartmontools - to display the information related to SMART hard drives

ethtool - to disable the Wake on LAN property

If you want to check the status of wifi or bluetooth and enable it or not, run the following commands

wifi [on | off | toggle]

bluetooth [on | off | toggle]

Or, check the battery status

sudo tlp-stat -b

If you need to know the status of the temperature

sudo tlp-stat -t

With this command the configuration will be applied way battery Regardless of the current power source, either the battery or the power outlet, as the case may be, use these commands

sudo tlp bat

sudo tlp ac

And there is still a long list of commands that you can use with this tool, you can take a look at this site for more information, if your distribution is not Ubuntu or Linux Mint you can enter here to have the installation instructions in your favorite distribution.

There are many and very diverse options for optimizing energy consumption, it is all about finding an increasingly efficient way to extend the life of the laptop battery, however I am one of those who think that it is best to avoid using it unless it is the last resort.