powertop

powertop to the rescue! https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop

powertop is just relaying whatever value my laptop's battery is reporting for current+voltage, read from sysfs[0]. Are you suggesting my laptop's battery is merely estimating current and/or voltage? I don't know much about the hardware in my laptop's battery, and I'm not succeeding in finding information online, but I'm going to need a source to believe that considering how trivial it would be for the battery to report real values for current and voltage. Regardless, your point about AC/DC conversion losses is good considering the article almost certainly was measuring from AC seeing as how it doesn't have a battery. [0] https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/blob/master/src/measure...

It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup. So you can omit your mouse! Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well. Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into. https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116

For measuring draw on the battery I have a status bar script that pulls /sys/class/power_supply/BAT?/power_now As for reducing power usage that's always a game of whack a mole every time you get a new laptop. 1. TLP is a great starting point - https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html 2. Powertop can help pin down devices and the various settings to persist via udev rules - https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop 3. The arch wiki is always a great resource - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management 4. And naturally you'll have to fiddle with various bios settings. It's a game of trial and error. Turn one thing on, measure, turn it off, measure. And of course some devices will go into powersaving mode, but wont come out of it so you'll blacklist those in udev powersaving rules.

Generally a good place to start would be powertop[1] 1: https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop (my memory is it's in the Ubuntu repos so you should be able to apt install it) it has an "I'm feeling lucky" flag, > powertop --auto-tune which theoretically should make good choices for you.