Can confirm. Battery life on my T420 went from about 3 to about 7 hours after installing. No manual config necessary.

I mention "T420" because I think it's pretty manufacturer-specific. ThinkPad and XPS usually have good hardware support on commmon Linux distributions, but other laptops may not.

I have not, but will check it out. My problem is I love the idea of being able to tinker and get to a super stable, lovable mobile Linux setup, but I just don't have time right now. Maybe someday. :)

It's not much tinkering at all. Once you've installed powertop (probably just "dnf install powertop" or "apt install powertop", or whatever your favorite flavour is), you can just run "sudo powertop --auto-tune"[0]. If you do like to tinker, you could maybe write your own init script to run that on boot, but your distro probably included one already.

0 - https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-powertop/

I think with tlp/powertop you can leave settings to their (good) default values. It's just a matter of installing these tools.

As with the other comment saying "have you used X/Y command" it is funny, given the original article.

Someone should setup a list of all these "tricks" and non-standard "patches" that people have to use in Linux after installing it so that it works decently.

Nowadays my desktop PC is a Linux (Mint) one. I like it, and I use it for several things, including gaming. But I don't kid me, the usability is utter crap, and coming from a 25 year yourny with Linux, it is still playing catchup with regards to hardware control (audio, bluetooth, wifi, etc).

Why do you think the usability is crap? Can you be more specific? I haven't had any issues with audio/bluetooth/wifi and many many people at my workplace use linux for development and I haven't heard about audio/wifi related issues since maybe 10 years ago.

Sure:

- bluetooth headphones refuse to connect half of the time (they work 100% on my phone and on windows on same hardware)

- audio: sometimes sound just refuses to play.. have to restart graphical session.

- upgrade: after upgrading mint to latest version, restarting got stuck in the terminal: it was missing some package. Had to manually pat install it.

- Android studio/mobile: have to fight for the OS to recognize connected mobile for adb.

- Game: CS:GO sometimes sound is either choppy or "fixing" it in game settings makes it leggy. Same game in steam as well works fine in windows in same hardware.

And the list of thousand paper cuts could go on.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Mint as my main OS in that computer. I have always been a Linux/BSD enthusiast. When I was in my 20s I enjoyed a lot tinkering with it, to make X11R6 work, then winmodems, then sound cards (with alsa), then wifi , etc. But nowadays at 37, I care less and less about dealing with that kind of thing.

Yeah, I don't get it. I set it up for a lot of my family, including grandpas and whatnot, taught them how to upgrade packages and basically forgot about it. With Windows that was never possible.