Hey, I recently returned to Manjaro after a hiatus on Windoze & a few BSODs later I am now happily dual booting and enjoying gaming and using the linux desktop as my daily driver (note I have a desktop PC here, not a laptop). It took a bit of time to get my hardware working fully but all in all I’m pretty happy with the experience (my bookmarks show some of this journey)
How do I manage power in the right way on a desktop PC?
Having used linux on and off for some time I’ve always been a bit perplexed as to what the Power Management guidance is for desktop users.
There is no “right way”. There are approaches. Desktop Users usually don’t need extra power management settings.
Nope. No software is required. You can fully manage it with cat and echo as root at /proc and /sys. But it’s a matter of comfort. TLP can also be useful for desktop users, although the manager’s goal is to reduce performance to save battery.
I suspect the “right” way depends on what you want to do.
I, myself, just use KDE’s functionality to turn off the screen after 2 minutes of inactivity. And I use xidlehook to suspend my computer after 10 minutes’ inactivity (so 8 minutes after the screen’s gone off). I do this only to not use my solar system’s battery when not necessary.
This is sufficient for me. For you it might be different.
Hey everyone and thanks for getting back to me so swiftly !
@megavolt - great to know that there isn’t really a need for me to configure anything and that default out of the box settings are good to roll with. If I had edit rights I’d update that wiki with exactly what you said as a disclaimer for desktop users!
Is there a particular guide you use to manage things via /proc, /sys?
If you don’t mind me asking - what do you do on your machine?
@Mirdarthos
I like your take & thanks for the warm welcome! I suppose what I’m looking for is an ‘official’ way to manage this with a strong guide for someone that knows little about it - either within Gnome settings or via an interface like TLP-UI . If such doesn’t exist that’s fair enough given @megavolt’s response. Nice to hear you have solar storage. Power2ya indeed, lol.
My use cases are really;
I’m keen to maximise performance when I’m playing games so just want the hardware to get the power it needs without interruption or degredation
I don’t think it makes sense to have overkill settings when this isn’t the case.
Again given @megavolt’s response - I suppose it is frankly up to me to have a play with a solution like TLP or other - or better still , just leave things with out of the box settings and take a different approach if truly needed later on. For now I think that’s what I’ll be going with rather than having to incur the overhead of managing something that doesn’t truly need it vs the kernel / manjaro defaults.
@bendipa1 Cheers Paul , using gnome here . The aforementioned ‘power-profiles-daemon’ has settings that I can set in the gnome GUI but I have little understanding of them yet without digging through the repo.
Love the community here thanks all for the assists!
(See any thread in the official msft support forum and try telling me it is better! )
In your case it’s pretty simple. Do not install TLP, makes little to no sense for desktop PC’s. Have a look into paragraph 3.1 of following link if you want to tinker a little bit on the performance. More is not needed.
Yes, I’m trying to lessen my dependence on the grid, on coal, so the Solar is the way I’m going. Still working on getting rid of the geyser, but at least it’s going. Maybe too slowly for my liking, but at least it is…
Gamemode is a daemon and library combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.
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