A friend is flying to the US from Europe and asked me a very thought-provoking question, which I am not remotely able to answer with substance so I am asking it here:
How to absolutely maximise battery life on an Ubuntu (laptop) install?
do not rush to mark this as duplicate, there is an important point here: does -GNOME- help or worsen battery life?
Let me provide some context:
The only task he needs to perform is: edit text files in Vim.
He is unsure whether running GNOME will drain his battery life more or actually save him some battery life given the smarts of GNOME's power management features like "switch this peripheral to -power save- after X minutes..." (GNOME might just be a configuration front-end for settings that are governed by command-line utils for all I know?)
He could perfectly well boot the system in text-only mode and use the automatic 6 virtual consoles for his needs, if that's a saving at all over running tmux (I think so because of all the smart buffering/history/etc the latter does by default?)
Exactly how would you advise him to run his laptop during his flight?
What I told him already:
power off WiFi in the BIOS, not from the "GUI"
power off Bluetooth
switch off the courtesy light and use low monitor brightness
play music off of his phone, not mp3blaster
do not use his tiny portable mouse (and do not attach any other USB gimmicks like "screen light", etc)
stop development services he will not be using, especially apache2, tomcat, dovecot, postgresql, etc.
Potentially:
- switch off his cron jobs? (he does an rsync + tar + 7za of his "work in progress" every so often)
I think the above is standard stuff one could get off StackExchange, and with many duplicates... the core of this question is, I think:
__ will running Ubuntu in text-only mode be a saving in terms of battery life or a problem? why? (provide some technical arguments) __
I think it will be a saving but I am also scared about "other things" detecting and enabling advanced chipset power management features only when some services are started.. and fear these "services" may be off in text-only mode?
