Hi,
I've got a brand new Dell Precision 3570 Laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-
installed. After figuring out recovery partition and tools, I installed Debian
Testing (Bookworm) side-by-side (since using a live medium doesn't really work
because it's based on Stable which isn't supporting the keyboard/touchpad well
yet).
Based on powertop the energy consumption of Ubuntu after booting, in a Gnome
one Wayland-session, running nothing but a terminal, is about 2.79 - 3.37
Watts, with an average of 3.08 W (over 15 measurements in a row).
In Debian Testing (Bookworm), also Gnome on Wayland, fresh boot, terminal
running powertop, I get about 5.0 Watts, so ~60% higher. This after installing
tlp (has been installed in Ubuntu) - before it has been around 8 - 10 W.
On Debian I also compared the output of tlp-stat; I could align some settings
afterwards (I added tlp config files and added some boot parameters:
workqueue.power_efficient=1, i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 and i915.i915_enable_dc=1).
To me, there doesn't seem to be much difference anymore, but the higher power
consumption remains. (There's only a SSD inside, no spinning discs, and screen
brightness is set to the minimum in both cases. Bluetooth is deactivated in
Gnome settings.)
Measuring in TTY on Debian, after logout of the Gnome session, I get 4.9 W as
well.
Any ideas what I could do to get Debian to be as power efficient as Ubuntu?
Check the speed of your CPU's. It could be that Ubuntu was running at a slower speed than Debian. More speed, more watts used.
Thank you very much.
Best,
Bernd