Comparing Solus and Reducing Power in Dual GPU laptops highlights their efficiency differences.
Comparing Solus and Reducing Power in Dual GPU laptops highlights their efficiency differences.
Hello, everyone. I’d like to share what I’ve learned and experienced. If you’re using Solus (Linux) with a dual-GPU setup—especially laptops—I’ve noticed Nvidia GPUs can drain your battery quickly, even if you don’t rely much on graphics. The approach that helped me might be detailed in the PDF I provided, along with some terminal commands. Just keep in mind: if this risks damaging your machine, proceed at your own risk. If you have time and no critical data to back up, feel free to try it—I think it could help. Remember: when installing Solus for dual boot, disconnect the Windows 10 drive completely before moving to a separate partition, since Microsoft’s system layout can cause issues if not isolated. To run Solus in root mode, simply type “su” in the terminal, press Enter, and enter your admin password. This method is essential because sudo doesn’t always give root privileges by default. From my own experience, it really did work—battery consumption dropped from around 11W to about 4.5W on a laptop. For power efficiency, consider using gedit with a dark theme instead of Google Chrome, which uses more energy. Disabling the Nvidia card and removing ShutdownFailure.pdf can also help.
This method turns off the GPU by removing its driver from the list, but there are alternative approaches. On Ubuntu, you can install a proprietary driver that works directly with the hardware. For other distributions, using bbswitch and bumblebee helps disable the second GPU because they include the necessary ACPI commands. This isn't the most common solution.
Blacklisting Noveau proved ineffective here; it worked reliably during power tests but failed afterward when other approaches were used.
Despite using bumblebee, the card might stay active even when the kernel module is turned off on some faulty ACPI laptops. It’s likely you’ll need to switch to a manual ACPI override method or explore alternative solutions like TP-Link.