Does your favorite distribution install TLP by default? Is the installer aware of the computer chassis type to know whether or not to install it? I have been enjoying the benefits of TLP on openSUSE for at least the last 3 years (since I first looked for it). I haven’t tweaked it but I am starting to wonder if maybe I could squeeze a bit more out of my machine.
My experience on openSUSE has been that TLP is automatically installed on all my laptops and not on my desktop which seems to make sense. Is there benefit in TLP on a desktop? Have you used TLP on a desktop in conjunction with some kind of UPS? Just something I have been noodling around.
2 Likes
TLP is awesome. Not sure if my distro installs it or not. Need to check since I just changed disrto’s.
I use tlp and most of the times I have to install it manually. Debian does not install it by default. In fact most distros do not. I know OpenSuse Tumbleweed indeed does, that is great.
Funny thing is on Fedora I do not install it. Fedora is the only distro that out-of-the-box feels great with battery life without tlp. It could be some kernel optimization.
1 Like
I think it would be an interesting test to see how Fedora without TLP vs openSUSE Tumbleweed with TLP would be. I know that the Fedora and openSUSE Communities work together on a lot of things, packaging, for instance. If I had the extra hardware that was worth the time, I would run this experiment.
It seems like a good idea for distro maintainers to focus on optimizing for laptops. Maybe have an option in the installer or a process that checks to see if the machine is a laptop and then installs tlp and other things to make the laptop experience better out of the box. I frequently see people say they get poor battery performance on Linux compared to Windows and I know this is due to lack of optimization. It’s a bit much to expect new users to know they need to add these things.
3 Likes