I recently purchased a Galago Pro 12th Gen Intel i5 1240p from System 76. The laptop has a lot going for it, an amazing keyboard, nice screen, LOTs of ports (including ethernet), but it has a problem. The installed 51 w/hr battery gets terrible, and I mean terrible battery life under Linux. I started with my standard distro Mint 21.1 with the 5.15 kernel, I was getting maybe 3 hours at best. I upgraded to the Ubuntu OEM kernel 6.0 then 6.1 and maybe gained 30 minutes. After an issue on another laptop (HP Dev One) with a BIOS issue, I added the System 76 PPA to the Galago Pro, and it updated the kernel to the 6.2 series, and installed the System 76 power manager. TLP was my previous go-to. Battery life increased by maybe 30 more minutes.

I think that the 12th Gen Intel processors need something special that Linux is just not ready to provide. On my 10th Gen Lemur Pro, I get between 16-20 hours of normal use. I have the screen at 10% brightness (still very bright). On the Galago, I keep it at 10% brightness as well. I have done everything I can think to do in regards to power use. My only conclusion right now, is that there is something about those 12th Gen Intel chips that require some special coding to get the most out of them. HTOP shows I have 16 cores running.

If it was not for the battery issue, the Galago would be an absolutely outstanding laptop.

1240p + 51wh battery? 4 hours doesn't sound crazily wrong. 5-5.5 hours at best is about right. P series CPU's are MASSIVELY inefficient. Alder Lake in general is inefficient, but while the U's aren't AWFUL, the P's are truly abysmal battery life. My 1245U (~15-watt vs. your ~28-watt P) with 51.5 wh battery Struggles to get 6.5 hours, and that's through any and all OS's that's been on it (Arch, Windows 10, Windows 11, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

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Thank you for that information. I was unaware of just how bad the 12th gen chips are. I should have gotten an 11th gen one before they were gone. I went back to Pop!_OS to try and get better battery life. I will most likely re-install Fedora when 38 hits stable, since I seemed to get better battery from Fedora with TLP. As it is, I cannot take the laptop with me anywhere unless I lug along the battery, unless I have it at 100% charge. Also the battery life as shown in inxi -Fxz shows faster decline than in my other System 76 units.

Yeah, Alder Lake is built on the same (although further refined) Intel 7 process as Tiger Lake was, however U to U class (since Tiger Lake didn't have P class) has MORE THAN DOUBLED the total amount of cores. Yes, 8 of those cores are the smaller, less powerful "efficiency" cores, but still, that's a lot more cores. And of course the trade off is that Alder Lake U series absolutely TRASHES Tiger Lake in computational power. Something on the order of 60%+ more powerful CPU overall. So while it is less efficient, it's going to get most tasks done MASSIVELY faster than Tiger Lake. For many, this is an acceptable trade-off, it certainly is to me. 11th gen for me was just agonizingly slow after having used Ryzen 4000/5000 series CPU's. And 6 hours is usually sufficient for me on battery life. Although yes, the P series is getting a very bad reputation because they tend to be painfully hot running and be more of a "portable computer" than truly a mobile solution.

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Can you guys get around the inefficiency?
1. Compiling a custom kernel specifically to change the cpu parameters to OnDemand, etc
2. Using something even lighter than XFCE and including laptop mode tools

I have several laptops that I purchased with processors ranging from 10th Gen Intel i5, 11th gen Intel i5, an HP Dev One with the AMD 5850U, and then the Galago with the 12th gen. The HP Dev One is by far the fastest of the laptops other than the Galago. But for what I do, I cannot really tell the difference between them. I had spent years saving up, and using hand me downs, and finally decided to purchase some good laptops. My 10th Gen Lemur pro was a gift from the wife and kids so it does not count.

But your explaination makes complete and absolute sense based on my observations. Battery life, no matter what distro I use, on the Galago never gets better than about 5.5/6 hours with everything I can do to save energy. I normally keep the screen at 10-15% max, and use as many power saving tricks as I can. The Lemur Pro and Darter Pro give me 10-14 hours easy.

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Update, working on saving power on the 12th Gen is apparently futile. These things are space heaters.

I went back to Fedora 37, soon to be Fedora 38.

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Ok, an update to the update which updated the update.... Fedora 38 was working great until it broke one day, and I do not have the Linux knowledge to diagnose the failure. Suddenly Chrome just started not showing any question box, or allowing me to open tabs. Also it suddenly started having screen artifacts which were odd. It was after a big update that appeared to have some MESA drivers. Firefox still worked but not Chrome, which was just too odd. So Mint with the Linux-oem-22.04c went back on it (6.1 kernel), and I lost some power, I was really liking Fedora 38 Cinnamon since it gave me a full six hours of power. This thing still causes the fans to ramp up and boy are they loud!!!