[RESPONDED] Extremely Poor Battery Life on Linux Mint

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
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Just yesterday received my FW 13 AMD DIY Kit, and battery life has been all over the place, but overall it’s been very poor. The only things I’ve done so far have been installing a few programs(none run in the background), and I installed the OS and used the built-in tools to update drivers. After noticing this battery drain issue, I updated the kernel to version 6.5. Still, I’m getting a 3 hour total battery life estimate from the laptop, and since I started writing this 5 min ago it has gone down 3 percent. I’m very new to Linux, so there’s very likely something critical I missed, but I can’t find any answers yet. Any ideas as to what could be causing this? My specs are as follows:
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.2
FW 13 AMD 7840u
Sabrent Rocket 1TB
2x16 DDR5 GSkill 5600mts Sodimm
2x USB-C expansion cards, both in back slots
2x USB-A expansion cards, both in front slots

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I had this SSD in my old laptop (or an older version of it) and it’s rather power hungry. Additionally, its power management is broken, at least on linux. So maybe that’s one reason. Do you have another SSD to test against?

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Assuming this is right this has an extremely old kernel:

Linux Mint 21.2 features Cinnamon 5.8, a Linux kernel 5.15 and an Ubuntu 22.04 package base.

The minimum for proper AMD Phoenix support is kernel 6.1.y, but there are more power optimizations that have landed in more modern kernels (for example kernel 6.5 will enable amd-pstate by default).

Running in something older will mean the graphics never go into a low power state and will eat battery like nothing else.

2 Likes
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Hi @EveryCoolMelon, welcome to the community!

As Mario noted, your kernel is pretty typical of Mint (old) and unsupported.

I believe Linux Mint 21.2 Edge ISO has kernel 6.2 on it and while it’s not one I have tested (focused on OEM C/D for Ubuntu at the moment), it’s going to be at least in the 6.x cycle at the very minimum.

Please note, this is why we are hyper focused on Ubuntu LTS and Fedora 39 for AMD at this time. Available resourcing to test against the community distros just isn’t there right now.