Three years ago I bought a Lenovo laptop. I, who was more tower computers, had bought my second laptop, the first being a 10 ″ with which I used more "tablet type" than anything else. The battery lasted just over two hours but, not being used to it, he thought that was normal. The thing changed when passing me a Kubuntu, at which point I saw that the battery consumption plummeted compared to Ubuntu.
This year, I have definitely switched sides and now my main computer is a laptop. Although I still have a 10-year-old Mac that works perfectly for audio editing, the laptop allows me to do whatever I want wherever I want, not to mention that what I have now is quite powerful. The specifications say that the battery can last up to 8 hours, but of course, those 8 hours are tested in Windows and with some specific settings. In Ubuntu, without touching anything, it marks me that it can last about 5 hours, while in Kubuntu the battery consumption is even higher and it rarely arrives at 4. Why?
Kubuntu and its file indexing
Performing a search on the internet, I have come up with a solution that had already been discussed in Kubuntu 18.04. I love Kubuntu, it has programs to do anything just after installing from scratch, but using a "full" operating system may not be a great idea. Who has not ever searched for something related to "how to extend the battery of my smartphone" on the internet? Over the years, smartphones improve their software, do more things, but everything they do consumes battery. For that reason, the interesting thing is to deactivate the services that we are not going to use. This was even more important a little over 5 years ago when the battery management of mobile operating systems was worse and we deactivated the 3G, the GPS, we put the screen with little intensity ...
In Kubuntu, the problem that causes consumption to skyrocket is said to be primarily one option. This option indexes ALL the files that we have on our computer, that is, it is constantly checking what we have on our PC and what we have added. Thanks to this function we can find files more quickly, something we can do from the start menu or from Krunner. Deactivating it and extending the life of our battery is as simple as going to Preferences / Search and deactivate the option «Activate file search».
Another way to reduce the battery consumption of any operating system is turn off bluetooth. Just as the file indexer is constantly looking for files, Bluetooth is looking for devices to interact with. If we use KDE Connect it is not worth it, but if we do not have anything Bluetooth to connect our PC to, it is a good idea to deactivate it.
I have done the test and I have seen that, once these two changes have been made, the battery consumption is similar to that of Ubuntu with a similar use. Have you managed to reduce the battery consumption of your Kubuntu?
Look at the Manjaro KDE forum this was commented on last year and users and developers agreed that the baloo indexer should only be stopped with the following commands: sudo balooctl status then sudo balooctl stop and sudo balooctl disable (to check that the indexer is active write sudo balooctl status and if you want to re-activate it simply sudo balooctl enable and then sudo balooctl start) Since 2018 my Dell Series 5000 14 ″ computer lasts almost 6 and a half hours… Greetings from southern Chile.
Here is my current status of the indexer file on my Dell laptop in sgte. picture : https://i.imgur.com/e1Aidpl.png