Hey guys, I’m just an ordinary dev looking for something to work on. While messing around with my hobby projects, I couldn’t help but notice that under the surface, there are a lot of places that the libre desktop can be improved. I’d like to take on your suggestions on what I should seriously consider working on and helping out with.
Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
(For those wondering, I’m still working on my other stuff.)
Sleep battery usage.
Seriously, I don’t know what is up with Linux but it wastes so much battery during sleep. My laptop lasts 8 hours on normal, daily use, but if I put it to sleep: 24h max.
Isn’t sleep supposed to just keep the RAM powered on because that component requires power to keep state? How can “keeping the lights on” waste so much energy?
I have given up on sleep long ago. Why don’t you just hibernate? With ssds the boot is really quick.
Edit: I got frustrated with ACPI and uefi issues on my laptops. I wish we had open source uefis for most laptops.
I thought sleep would be good, but I think you’re right. At this point I might just give up on sleep.
Unfortunately, that means repartitioning my drive as I don’t have swap at all (64GB RAM) 😢
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Usually swap can be quite a bit smaller than RAM it might still work.
Edit: You might want to check out lvm if you do repartition. Also many filesystems support swap files on them.
I’ve read about LVM a few times, but it feels like I’d need a deep dive in file systems to get it.
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Hibernate to swapfile is possible you don’t need to repartition
Hadn’t thought about that! I’ll have a look. IIRC it’s not recommended on BTRFS, but maybe that changed.
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How old is your machine? Starting 10 or so years ago, but really picked up the pace is “modern standby” or S0 standby. Basically in sleep your laptop doesn’t go to sleep, it enters a “low power state” and even worse, keeps wifi on and tries to run background tasks. It’s supposed to be quick to wake from sleep but it’s not. S1 standby was incredibly fast to wake.
Literally the last thing I want my computer do do when in sleep is compute. I want it to use as little power as possible without dumping my ram.
I just use hibernation now. Fuck sleep. It was S3, but still wasting a lot of energy even though it’s supposed to be handled by hardware after the kernel hands it off.
@[email protected] let me to the path of light. Boot is slow, but that’s fine. Battery life is more important to me.