Manjaro: Slow, runs hot and low battery life on my laptop

Hey guys, having some issues with Manjaro using a fresh install of the latest release on an Acer Aspire 5.

Just through normal use I notice the laptop continually runs quite warm and the battery life is extremely low compared to windows, about 2 hours in Manjaro vs about 8 hours in Windows 10. I also noticed that overall the system is just slow in general, one frustrating example being that typing is really laggy. Even now it sometimes takes close to a second for the screen to catch up to what I’m typing, it’s very jarring.

I have a suspicion it has something the issue might lie with my video driver, however I don’t have any options to change the actual driver in the manjaro hardware settings, it seems to just be happy with whatever came with the OS.

Wondering if anyone else has had any issues with a hardware setup similar to mine and has any tips?

Pasted my inxi below, let me know what else you need

inxi -Fza
System:    Kernel: 5.10.32-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 10.2.0 
           parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64 root=UUID=313367de-e0e0-4859-af9b-e6b723f4ce23 rw quiet apparmor=1 
           security=apparmor resume=UUID=b167e789-9adb-4bd4-816f-9d40f85cfc4e udev.log_priority=3 
           Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.21.4 tk: Qt 5.15.2 wm: kwin_wayland vt: 1 dm: SDDM Distro: Manjaro Linux base: Arch Linux 
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: Acer product: Aspire A515-43 v: V1.11 serial: <filter> 
           Mobo: PK model: Grumpy_PK v: V1.11 serial: <filter> UEFI: Insyde v: 1.11 date: 11/16/2020 
Battery:   ID-1: BAT1 charge: 33.8 Wh (62.5%) condition: 54.1/53.0 Wh (102.1%) volts: 15.4 min: 15.4 model: PANASONIC AP19B5L 
           type: Li-ion serial: <filter> status: Discharging 
CPU:       Info: Quad Core model: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen/Zen+ 
           note: check family: 17 (23) model-id: 18 (24) stepping: 1 microcode: 8108109 cache: L2: 2 MiB 
           flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 33535 
           Speed: 2394 MHz min/max: 1400/2100 MHz boost: enabled Core speeds (MHz): 1: 2394 2: 2374 3: 2382 4: 2380 5: 2379 
           6: 2381 7: 2378 8: 2390 
           Vulnerabilities: Type: itlb_multihit status: Not affected 
           Type: l1tf status: Not affected 
           Type: mds status: Not affected 
           Type: meltdown status: Not affected 
           Type: spec_store_bypass mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp 
           Type: spectre_v1 mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization 
           Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Full AMD retpoline, IBPB: conditional, STIBP: disabled, RSB filling 
           Type: srbds status: Not affected 
           Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected 
Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Picasso vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: amdgpu v: kernel 
           bus-ID: 05:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:15d8 class-ID: 0300 
           Device-2: Quanta HD User Facing type: USB driver: uvcvideo bus-ID: 1-1:2 chip-ID: 0408:a061 class-ID: 0e02 
           Display: wayland server: X.Org 1.21.1.1 compositor: kwin_wayland driver: loaded: amdgpu,ati unloaded: modesetting 
           alternate: fbdev,vesa display-ID: :1 screens: 1 
           Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 508x286mm (20.0x11.3") s-diag: 583mm (23") 
           Monitor-1: XWAYLAND0 res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 143 size: 340x190mm (13.4x7.5") diag: 389mm (15.3") 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics (RAVEN DRM 3.40.0 5.10.32-1-MANJARO LLVM 11.1.0) v: 4.6 Mesa 21.0.3 
           direct render: Yes 
Audio:     Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Raven/Raven2/Fenghuang HDMI/DP Audio vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI 
           driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 05:00.1 chip-ID: 1002:15de class-ID: 0403 
           Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Raven/Raven2/FireFlight/Renoir Audio Processor vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI 
           driver: N/A alternate: snd_pci_acp3x, snd_rn_pci_acp3x bus-ID: 05:00.5 chip-ID: 1022:15e2 class-ID: 0480 
           Device-3: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 17h HD Audio vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus-ID: 05:00.6 chip-ID: 1022:15e3 class-ID: 0403 
           Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.10.32-1-MANJARO running: yes 
           Sound Server-2: JACK v: 0.125.0 running: no 
           Sound Server-3: PulseAudio v: 14.2 running: yes 
           Sound Server-4: PipeWire v: 0.3.26 running: yes 
Network:   Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: r8169 
           v: kernel port: 2000 bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:8168 class-ID: 0200 
           IF: enp3s0 state: down mac: <filter> 
           Device-2: Intel Wireless 7265 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel port: 2000 bus-ID: 04:00.0 chip-ID: 8086:095a 
           class-ID: 0280 
           IF: wlp4s0 state: up mac: <filter> 
Bluetooth: Device-1: Intel Bluetooth wireless interface type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8 bus-ID: 1-4:4 chip-ID: 8087:0a2a 
           class-ID: e001 
           Report: rfkill ID: hci0 rfk-id: 5 state: down bt-service: enabled,running rfk-block: hardware: no software: yes 
           address: see --recommends 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 238.47 GiB used: 15.77 GiB (6.6%) 
           SMART Message: Unable to run smartctl. Root privileges required. 
           ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 maj-min: 259:0 vendor: SK Hynix model: HFM256GDJTNG-8310A size: 238.47 GiB block-size: 
           physical: 512 B logical: 512 B speed: 15.8 Gb/s lanes: 2 rotation: SSD serial: <filter> rev: 80002C00 temp: 37.9 C 
           scheme: GPT 
Partition: ID-1: / raw-size: 229.37 GiB size: 224.71 GiB (97.97%) used: 14.35 GiB (6.4%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2 
           maj-min: 259:2 
           ID-2: /boot/efi raw-size: 300 MiB size: 299.4 MiB (99.80%) used: 296 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 
           maj-min: 259:1 
Swap:      Kernel: swappiness: 60 (default) cache-pressure: 100 (default) 
           ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 8.8 GiB used: 1.42 GiB (16.2%) priority: -2 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 maj-min: 259:3 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 47.0 C mobo: 0 C gpu: amdgpu temp: 47.0 C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:      Processes: 264 Uptime: 13h 08m wakeups: 4 Memory: 5.74 GiB used: 5.21 GiB (90.7%) Init: systemd v: 247 
           tool: systemctl Compilers: gcc: 10.2.0 Packages: 1217 pacman: 1214 lib: 328 flatpak: 0 snap: 3 Shell: Bash v: 5.1.0 
           running-in: konsole inxi: 3.3.04

Ok. A longshot but… does anything change if you use x.org session instead of wayland?

I’ve had similar issues in the past usually related with wayland but it has been quite a while. And if I read this correctly the speed of the CPU is quite high.

I actually just switched to Wayland yesterday in hopes that it would speed things up, but good thought!

Switching back to Xorg doesn’t seem to help sadly. Going to try out a few different kernels to see if anything helps

You’re using quite a bit of RAM(90%) maybe that’s the cause? What is consuming so much???

Firefox is using an absurd amount of ram! Definitely could be part of the problem.