In my experience, battery life on laptops has been getting better all the time with Linux/Fedora. However, there’s a few things you can do if you need just a bit more battery life than you are getting with default settings.

First let me say that in the ideal world you wouldn’t have to do any of this. Things should just work and give you the best battery savings they can. Sadly, thats not fully the case (yet), so sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.

First, there’s some packages that try and set things for you: tuned and tlp (and possibly others, but those are the two I know of). If you are using tuned, you will want to run a ‘sudo tuned-adm profile powersave’ to switch to the powersave profile. With tlp it should switch to this automatically when it sees you are running on battery.

powertop has a bunch of recommended settings for power saving which you can automatically apply with ‘sudo powertop –auto-tune’ or by enabling the powertop service. You do need to be careful here however as some of these settings are not set that way by default because they cause lockups or other bad behavior. Do test this on your particular hardware before you trust it.

Finally there’s a bunch of common sense items: lower the screen brightness as much as you can (the screen is by far the largest power user on a laptop), put your bluetooth/wireless in airplane mode so they don’t consume power (if you don’t need them), remove usb devices (some of them suck up power even while not doing much), turn off keyboard backlight and such.