So, I saw this video on youtube that suggested to install TLP for better battery life. Is it really useful and holds to its name?
I always installed TLP when I used Zorin OS on a notebook computer.
Although it is generally an "install and that's it" application, it has many settings /grub parameters and is configurable.
I found it was very good at helping with battery management.
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I installed it also previously but didn't know it has settings. How do I access those settings?
is there any recommended settings that you suggest?
and will it interfere with the power options (balanced, performance, power saver)?
Not TLP, but I have had great results using auto-cpufreq.
Maybe you would like to check it out. It is a replacement for TLP, so do not run both at the same time.
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It might cause a conflict with the newer version of GNOME which gives you power management built-in (Balanced and Power Save). I would not use it.
This is a good point that I had not considered. I have never used it on the newest Gnome.
The package the newer Gnome uses is the power-profiles-demon. It is integrated into the quick settings as a separate button. TLP is gonna deactivate that, but if you prefer TLP and don't have a problem with not having power management in the quick settings, it's absolutely fine. I've done it many times without problems.
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what's the difference with tlp?
so, you don't recommend it with zorin 17?
I do not recommend it in order to prevent conflicts and not getting anything out of the new features already included with GNOME. Zorin works very well out-of-the-box and there are few things that improve it without having some adverse side effect. Try out th default settings in GNOME and if they don’t work for you then try out TLP.
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Well, this is what the author of auto-cpufreq has to say:
Why do I need auto-cpufreq?
One of the problems with Linux today on laptops is that CPU will run in unoptimized manner which will negatively reflect on battery life. For example, CPU will run using "performance" governor with turbo boost enabled regardless if it's plugged in to power or not.
Issue can be mitigated by using tools like indicator-cpufreq or cpufreq, but these still require manual action from your side which can be daunting and cumbersome.
Using tools like TLP will help in this situation with extending battery life (which is something I did for numerous years now), but it also might come with its own set of problems, like losing turbo boost.
With that said, I needed a simple tool which would automatically make "cpufreq" related changes, save battery like TLP, but let Linux kernel do most of the heavy lifting. That's how auto-cpufreq was born.
And yes, just as @piet-0 and @C141ZorinOS stated, it will conflict with the GNOME Power Profiles daemon. Due to this, auto-cpufreq will automatically disable it if you use the installer. If you use the Snap package instead, you should use the power_helper.py script post installation.
TL;DR: I do not claim that auto-cpufreq does a better job than TLP or the GNOME Power Profiles daemon. All I know is that it has given me tremendous battery life improvements on Zorin 16.3 and does not seem to hurt on 17, either.
Of course, you could always run some tests and see which serves you best. A little tinkering never hurt anybody and goes a long way towards managing the learning curve. 
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I installed tlp and then uninstalled it. do I have to do something to put zorins 17 (gnome) defaults?
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Hello, I would like to uninstall tlp, including the symlink I created. However, I have no idea how to do that, and it is to replace it with auto-cpu freq whilst avoiding conflict. This is what I did with the terminal:
You called systemctl without sudo. Unfortunately, I cannot see what happened after that. At his point, I would run:
sudo systemctl stop tlp.service
sudo apt remove tlp
sudo apt autoclean && sudo apt autoremove
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I didn't do anything beyond what's shown in the screenshot.
Thank you for the help!
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