Ubuntu 24.04 LTS aims to improve the energy efficiency of the Linux distribution on laptops

The Power Profiles Daemon is an interface that provides users with different battery profiles via the desktop environment's quick settings. An update to the power-profiles-daemon package used in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS brings some improvements to the "Balanced" power option.

"Since this release power-profiles-daemon is battery-state aware and some drivers use a more power efficient state when using the balanced profile on battery. In particular both the AMD and Intel P-State drivers will use the balance_power EPP profile, while for Intel one we also set the energy performance bias to 8 (instead of 6)," the developers write about the update on GitHub.

The command line tool "powerprofilectl" has been updated with some bug fixes and a man page, provided the "python3-argparse" package is installed on the Linux system. The CLI tool has also received additional debugging options, which can be viewed with "--help-debug" when calling powerprofilectl.

According to OMG! Ubuntu, a laptop running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS now switches to the "balance_performance" profile when a charging cable is plugged in. Intel and AMD systems that support CPU frequency scaling under Linux using P-State drivers will switch to the new "balance_power" profile thanks to the revised power profile daemon, which brings the total number of power profiles to four.

These optimisations should give notebook users with older Ubuntu installations even more reasons to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 with long-term support. The release date for Canonical's Linux distribution is currently scheduled for 25 April 2024.