Electricty Usage Efficiency

[food]

Hi Mobian team,

I've been using Mobian as my daily driver on Pinephone and it's been working every day.

I'm noticing the battery degrades really quickly over time, and I'm wondering if there's anyone working on increasing the energy efficiency of the operating system

I know I can buy a new battery for not that much money, though I'm concerned about the long-term cost of having a pile of dead batteries whereas Apple and Google have no piles of dead batteries.

wellwishes,
food

[Zebulon Walton]

At least the batteries are inexpensive and easy to swap. I have a holster for my Pinephone and keep a spare battery in it. It also has a small zippered pocket where I can keep a charging cable.

[tophneal]

to increase the likelihood of someone from the mobian team seeing/addressing your concern, i'd suggest jumping into their matrix channel https://matrix.to/#/#mobian:matrix.org

this forum is more focused on the Pine64 products itself and is often not the best method to contact software developers.

[biketool]

I think that hardware acceleration would really save battery, not sure how much the video and even audio acceleration is used in system vs by apps.
I wish I knew how Nokia made the Linux N-serias tablets and phones run for as long as they did on a smaller battery, even with video playing the backlight was over 50% of the battery discharge.

[SocialNetworkingWasAMistake]

I'd defo recommend switching to 3G if you want to save battery

[biketool]

In Maemo Linux(Nokia N900 and Linux mini-tablets) the battery savings was done in part by making all video and audio run through a hardware abstraction layer(HAL) to automatically get the HW acceleration while games were all piped through openGL(including the good commercial games hacked over from PalmOS). How is this handled in AMD64/X86 Debian?
I know that Kodi and VLC tear through battery charge on my 3/32 Pinephone/Mobian,
I can't really tell how well the default Videos app works or how fast it drains battery as I have never found a video file it could play.

[Zebulon Walton]

I'd defo recommend switching to 3G if you want to save battery

Unfortunately for many of us 3G is going away soon. That's why I bought the Pinephone in the first place, because my 3G flip phone would no longer work. I keep bluetooth turned off which may help battery life a little bit.

[biketool]

I keep bluetooth turned off which may help battery life a little bit.

Unless the config is really messed up(probably even if it is kludged to the maximum extent) BT can't really do much to waste power vs WiFi or GPS, even screen backlight.
I use BT PAN tethering(almost always preferable to WiFi hotspot for personal use) which maxes out data stream on another device(N900) the extra battery drain is because that device is pulling 3G data.
It helps a little but with how fast the pinephone/mobian drains battery it is negligible.
I will say that pinephone in sleep mode has massively improved.