I recently got a new Dell laptop. I believe it is a Precision 5000 and these are the specs
Dual boot Ubuntu 16.04 64bit/Kali 64bit
AMD A10-8700P Radeon R6, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G × 4
Gallium 0.4 on AMD CARRIZO (DRM 3.1.0, LLVM 3.8.0)
11.3 GiB

There are some small annoyances like the USB mouse and trackpad will stop working intermittently. The touchscreen works so I just use touch and if I log off and log back in I get my mouse/trackpad back. Sometimes when typing the trackpad will pick up my hands and select text. All minor things. However I noticed that Linux seems to eat the battery alive. I'm not sure if that's just a thing or if I haven't set up something quite right. Last night I got 30 minutes out of a fully charged battery. Whether I am in Ubuntu or Kali the fans are always going at full speed and the battery is draining like mad. The only two things ever connected via USB are mouse and an Alfa AWUS036 wireless adapter. Let me know if there is any other extra info needed that I should post.

PS
Is it possible to 0/1 the trackpad?

Have you tried running Additional Drivers yet, to check for additional drivers?

http://askubuntu.com/questions/47506...tional-drivers

No last time I did that on my old laptop it screwed up the Wifi card. I'm about to do some updates so I'll do it now and see what happens.

I just did it and got this any help?

Looks like you have two choices. Which do you think is the correct selection, to accomplish your goal of getting the hardware device to work?

Well looking at the screenshot I would say the (proprietery) but just wanted a second and more knowledgable opinion. Like I said I tried using this before and ended up screwing up my wifi card that was working on the drivers I installed.

What is the kernel version you using? Have you tried to use latest version?

Kernel is 4.4.0-47-generic

I searched the latest stable kernel and followed these instructions http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/...-ubuntu-16-04/ I downloaded them and installed via Ubuntu Software then did a reboot. When I do a uname -r I'm still getting 4.4.0-47-generic did I do something wrong?

I never had any luck with additional drivers type GUIs.

My laptop has an AMD processor, everything worked with no configuration other than installing the package firmware-linux-nonfree. If your wifi breaks, simply run lspci, look for a line like this:
And google what package the driver is in.

You can use the cpu freq package for your desktop environment or from the command line adjust your processor frequency, or use your environment's power saving settings. Kali and Ubuntu both run tons of stuff compared to, eg, a minimal Debian distro. Your idle CPU usage should be <5%, if it isn't it probably means you have a bunch of server packages you'll never used installed which start at run time.

Fewer graphics probably mean less GPU work -> less fans -> less power. You can check how hard the GPU is working by downloading radeontop and checking the pipeline percentage.

The touchpad issue has happened to me before. Since I'm about six months in the future (updates-wise), it's likely that you're dealing with the same bug now. Do you have the packages "xinput" and "xserver-xorg-input-libinput" installed?

Also that is probably the correct kernel version, Ubuntu lags behind the rolling distros like Sid or Gentoo. In Debian, I use the linux-image-amd64 package, I'm not sure if that's different than the generic one.

All of the package names I'm giving are what I have in synaptic, Ubuntu's may be different.

I suspect you need to go into the BIOS and change the power schemes in there.
Most are set to keep the cpu running at 100% by default for quick response. You need to change it -probably to "on demand" which will cause a tiny fraction of a second extra delay which you probably won't notice unless you are playing some particular games.

Thnks I've been on vacation just got back. Looks like I've got some research and things to look into. I don't have the "xinput" and "xserver-xorg-input-libinput" you mentioned.

You're way overthinking it. If your "Carrizo" chipset requires the AMD driver, then install the AMD driver. Until you do, your computer's performance will be substandard. It's that simple.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD

Went through that and on the AMD site when I put in the card I have it says "supported Distros: Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, 14.04.2" I'm on 16.04LTS. When I do the lspci command this is the output for my card 00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Carrizo [1002:9874] (rev c5) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]). Yes I am a noob so I don't know if that means I should load the fglrx driver or not?

I think it is worth a try.

If the GPU is not operating correctly, then the CPU will work harder, the fans will spin, the battery will drain...