Increase battery life with TLPUI

You may have noticed the battery life in Zorin is sometimes less than what it is on Windows, which may be annoying for some. Today, I'll help you fix that problem with this little guide I wrote up using TLPUI and a GNOME Shell extension called "Dynamic Battery". Doing this myself, I got a longer battery life than on Windows!

Installing TLPUI

First off, open up the terminal. You'll type the command
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:linuxuprising/apps. Hit enter, type your password and let it run.

After that's complete, type sudo apt update && sudo apt install tlpui -y

Finally, run tlpui in the command line. This will open the app.
(Keep in mind you don't need to change the settings if you don't want to).

Fixing the battery icon to be more accurate

Open your web browser and go to extensions.gnome.org.

Search for "Dynamic battery" and click on the first result. Flip the toggle switch to "On".

You'll now notice a different battery icon in your bottom panel, so now we need to make it fit in again.

Screenshot from 2021-03-05 10-25-05

Reload the extension page, then click on the little blue tools icon.

Select "Papirus" from the themes options. The battery icon will change back to normal.

Screenshot from 2021-03-05 10-27-57

You will notice now that the battery icon shows the correct charge amount:

Screenshot from 2021-03-05 10-29-28

That's it! I hope you found my tutorial useful, and hopefully your battery life is longer now too. Thanks for reading!

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Hi, I am new to Zorin and am enjoying the experience for the most part, I have followed the directions to install TLPUI, but when I enter the run command in terminal, I get the message:

Command 'run' not found, did you mean:

command 'rue' from snap darkdimension-rue (0.3.0)
command 'zun' from deb python3-zunclient (4.0.0-0ubuntu1)
command 'rup' from deb rstat-client (4.0.1-9)
command 'grun' from deb grun (0.9.3-2)
command 'runc' from deb runc (1.1.0-0ubuntu1~20.04.1)
command 'rn' from deb trn4 (4.0-test77-12)
command 'runq' from deb exim4-daemon-heavy (4.93-13ubuntu1.6)
command 'runq' from deb exim4-daemon-light (4.93-13ubuntu1.6)
command 'runq' from deb sendmail-bin (8.15.2-18)
command 'zrun' from deb moreutils (0.63-1)
command 'crun' from deb crun (0.12.1+dfsg-1)
command 'srun' from deb slurm-client (19.05.5-1)

Any suggestions?

"run" is not part of the tutorial and therefore you get an error :wink:

Thanks, found I can run from the main menu, should have known!

No problem. We all learn with each step. :slight_smile:

Awesome, I got CPU scaling back. I'd used that in Windows and it really ramps down the CPU frequency on light load. I could set it so it'd go all the way down to 200 MHz, but it wasn't stable at that frequency (if the screen turned off, the CPU would lock up, otherwise it'd run alright), I had to set the minimum to 800 MHz. Tlp-UI automatically set it to a minimum of 800 MHz.

I also got Turbo Boost back. I had to install a separate program (with a very kludgy interface that kept a small window open in order for it to work) from Intel to get that to work under Windows.

I'm liking Zorin OS more and more.

Unfortunately, this computer doesn't support any battery State of Charge limiters, so I can't limit battery charge to less than 100%. Oh, well...

Switching to Ubuntu - YouTube low consumption a battery.

I've got Zorin OS on three computers so far (Compaq Presario V3000, Dell Inspiron N7110, HP 17-cp1035cl). This new one has an AMD Ryzen 6-core CPU that can range from 400 MHz to 4.388 GHz. It's wicked fast on Zorin Core OS, and all that with a CPU TDP of only 15 W. It'll get even faster after I set up the ZFS L2ARC cache drives for bpool and rpool on a couple of 130 MB/s USB drives.

Question: Are there HP drivers similar to the Thinkpad Battery charge threshold in TLP-UI? I know battery state of charge can be limited on this machine under Windows.