SumnerI am getting terrible battery life on my MacBook Pro on Arch Linux (only about two hours). I have cpupower, powertop, and macfanctld enabled. I had to use macOS for a project recently and I realized that I was getting a lot better battery life (closer to 5 hours). Does anyone have ideas of how to troubleshoot?
Ben 
@sumner full ACK. having a similar experience. When I had Ubuntu gnome on my Lenovo I had around 8 hours of idling. Now I have around 4-5 with arch + lxde. Both with powertop. Haven't looked into it yet. If you find anything please let me know :D
AmericanIdiot@sumner It has been a while since I used Apple hardware, but the ones I had always ran hot. One of my buddies who knows more about such things explained to me that it had something to do with the semi-proprietary nature of Mac hardware. Makes it hard to support power management features (which are, of course, fully supported by MacOS). You might want to try some different distros, see if any of them have solved the problem for your hardware, and then reverse engineer their solution. Worst case.
wheeler@sumner Give TLP a try? If you ever solve this, let me know! I normally get a little more battery mileage with Debian variants but not sure why yet.
@sumner This is how I dealt with it on my system, though if you have a dGPU, that's probably your biggest culprit: https://www.newnix.space/blog/2015/7/23/dealing-with-power-drain-on-gnulinux-for-intel-based-machines
@architect @seasharp @Ghosty @wheeler @AmericanIdiot @Jasper_Ben an update on my battery life status. I haven't had a great opportunity to test it yet, but I did what you suggested and powertop went from ~40W power consumption to ~20W and it says that I will be getting ~4 hrs rather than ~2 which is much better. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.
@sumner @Jasper_Ben @wheeler @Ghosty @seasharp @architect Based on that article, I switched from the newer intel driver back to ACPI. On either "powersave" or "conservative" governor, the CPU fan is MUCH less active during light use. And this is on a System76 Galago, so it is not just limited to Apple hardware.
@seasharp @Ghosty @wheeler @Jasper_Ben @sumner @AmericanIdiot Yeah, it's a problem impacting certain intel SKUs, their intel_pstate cpu frequency scaling driver just goes crazy with them
SeaSharp@seasharp yes, it has an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M. Is there a way to turn switching on?
@sumner I can't locate all my old links (probably actually on my MBP) but the Arch Wiki (as usual) brings the goods.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/hybrid_graphics
You're likely looking at bumblebee and perhaps a wee bit of script-wrapping for high-performance graphcis apps on #Linux.
Could be wrong though: This stuff has been turned over countless times since 2012 I'm sure
@sumner For a quick fix just blacklist nouveau and your i915 should kick in at boot.
@seasharp I'm using the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I tried using bumblebee, but when I install it, X fails to start.
@sumner I'd suggest looking further into Bumblebee on the Arch Wiki to see if there's a recommended Xorg.conf setup. The wiki should also have help for configuring your integrated GPU and your Nvidia. Might also need some blacklisting.
It's a tricky process. See if someone has already done it before and you can just build from there.
@seasharp so, I identified the issue. My integrated Intel GPU is not detected by Linux. It is shown in System Information on macOS, but nothing in Linux.