Cfrgtkky

I have a Dell 7577 bought 2 months back with Windows 10 pre-installed (i7-7th gen + GTX 1060 6GB Max-Q). I dual-booted Ubuntu alongside Win 10.

I am using Dell power manager in Win 10 in an effort to optimize battery life.

My laptop is plugged in most of the time. Once in around 10 days I allow my battery to discharge and charge again to 85%.

Here's the difference indicating the issue:

In Win 10

• 
  Dell Power Manager Rule: Charge the battery upto 85% and then re-route the power directly to the System. Start charging again when
  power falls to 55% (which may take several days)



• I hardly heard the fans and the system used to stay pretty cool. I
  never felt any warmth near my palm rest.




• Usage: Casual browsing and movies. I don't game currently but I ran a couple games for test. I can hear the fans only when the game
  is on but still never felt warm near the palm rest.



• The battery gives me 3-4 hours (without game)
  

In Ubuntu

• Is there any Ubuntu/Linux tool like Dell Power Manager?.



• Even though I am casually browsing, the fans kick in like the engine
  of a racing car revving or an airliner is about to take off. It gets
  noticeably warm near the palm rest and the fans don't turn off they
  stay at a speed where I hear them loud enough working hard to keep it cool




• Usage: Not started coding yet. Just casual browsing, installing a few things like eclipse, anaconda etc. I'll be using Ubuntu mostly
  for Coding



• Currently the battery gives me only 40 minutes or so.

Explain me if its an expected behaviour or suggest a solution to optimize battery life, thermals and hardware life w.r.t Ubuntu.

Thanks --Jay

After reading a few articles on the internet and trying a few things out, I guess the issue was somehow the CPU cores were kept at higher frequencies even if it didn't have much work to do. As a result the CPU used to get hot and fans kicked in harder to cool them down.

Solution is frequency scaling.

You may also undervolt (Watch a few good tutorials first though. You may use TLP or Intel Xtreme Tuning Utility (XTU). I haven't done this step.)

Some basics concepts of processor power management can be found in below links

Intel Docs P States

Intel Docs C States

Intel Docs More on Power Management

Apart from this some things seriously eating juice are:
Screen Brightness,
Wifi,
Bluetooth

A few simple things worked.

1. Check if you have all correct drivers installed.



2. 
   

   Install CPUFreq Indicator
   CPUFREQ is a quite helpful indicator applet that you lets you control your system’s CPU speed. In Ubuntu 18.04 it has 2 options: Performance and Powersave. You can select via the option on top right corner of screen.

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq

   
   

NOTE: No need to install CPUFreq separately if you're going to use TLP

3. Install PowerTop

sudo apt-get install powertop

and run it a few times (ON BATTERY) to calibrate (It will tell you on screen how many readings you need). These readings are PowerTop checks how much power is used for various things like screen brightness, using 1 core, using all cores, using wifi etc (correct me if I am wrong) and gives you a set of readings which you may inspect as to what is eating up juice. In Tunables, “Bad” indicates a setting that’s not saving power, although it might be good for performance. “Good” indicates a power saving setting is in effect. You may let it auto tune

sudo powertop --auto-tune

NOTE: Don't use autotune if you have TLP also as attempting to apply powertop's --auto-tune settings on each boot will conflict with TLP

Read here: FAQs on using Powertop with TLP in TLP documentation

4. Install TLP
   TLP can cover the functionalities of both the tools mentioned above in terms of actually managing power settings. It lets you do a lot of things with power management in true sense. There is a big settings file in which you can keep power settings the way you want (e.g. what devices to turn on after boot, turn wifi off if disconnected etc), save it and then start the TLP service.

you can simply type sudo apt-get install tlp OR read the documentation which covers everything in more detail.

TLP Documentation

TLP Power settings and configurations documentation

TLP FAQs

5. Keep screen brightness lowest possible yet visible. Keep bluetooth and Wifi Off unless needed. Connect an ethernet wire if need be. See what processes are running in background on startup. Disable unnecessary processes.




6. To set battery threshold levels like in Windows, the thing is whatever is set in Windows using Dell Power manager is also respected in Linux. I didnt explicitly find any tool for that in Ubuntu. However, there is something called Dell Command | Configure which gives you a client configuration toolkit (cctk) with such options. Refer the link below. I installed it and tried to run it but it said it cannot read settings from my BIOS. So didn't work for me but may work for you.

Dell Command Configure

Installation and document links are given in the above article

7. For nVidia Graphic card, first install drivers via Software and Updates GUI then go to nVidia X server settings application and in PRIME profiles switch to Intel Graphic card if you dont need nVidia when on battery or doing normal stuff like browsing.

Experts can correct me if anything is inappropriate above