User:Saul/Laptop

Brightness

At first the brightness controls won't work after a fresh install so here are some steps to try:

1. Update all the packages in the update manager, on a fresh install this installs a new kernel version - 5.15.0-41.
2. Open the Driver Manager application and use the latest Nvidia one, both 515.48.07 and 470.129.06 worked fine for me.
3. Restart the computer

If the brightness controls still do not work after that try the following steps.

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

# Change the line:
# GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
# To become
# GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video.use_native_backlight=1"

sudo update-grub

Then again restart the computer and test again. If it is still not working (it should be) try these next steps:

# WARNING: This next step kills the user interface so make sure you memorize all the steps.
sudo service lightdm stop
# Hit ctrl-alt-f1 to open a session then login using your credentials.

sudo X -configure
sudo cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo reboot

The following notes might be of use if it still is not working but probably won't fix it outright.

The later linux kernels seem to handle the newer hardware better than the older ones so you can try installing mainline and installing a later kernel say 5.16 but make sure to uninstall it again if it does not install without errors. (You can still use it but some things will be broken like dependencies.) Another thing you can try is looking up brightness options for the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Battery

TL;DR;

1. Hybrid graphics mode (bios)
2. NVIDIA On-Demand mode (nvidia-primus)
3. Display 60Hz
4. TLP

The battery life was terrible at first - like less than 3h bad, however this can be fixed to give 10h or more. The first thing to do is ensure the computer is in dynamic graphics mode (set in the bios), this stops forcing the gpu to run all the time. The next thing to do is put nvidia primus (The amd? icon on the bottom right) into NVIDIA On-Demand mode - do not set it to AMD Power Saving Mode because contrary to the name it chews threw a lot of power for some reason. Another thing you can do is change the display to 60hz which saves a bit of battery. The next thing to do is install tlp.

TLP

# Install
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw

# Start (alternatively restart the computer)
sudo tlp start

# Verify it is running.
tlp-stat -s

You can further tune tlp by editing /etc/tlp.conf but personally the defaults were good enough for me.

Slimbook

You can install and use slimbook with tlp but be warned it does change a lot of tlp settings on install. Slimbook will give you a UI for configuring some of tlp's options.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:slimbook/slimbook

sudo apt update

sudo apt install slimbookbattery