Wow, I really have to admit, that openSUSE improved a lot with regards to power consumption. Should be around 11.3 when I compared with less nice results. But I really appreciate that. It is finally at the level of Ubuntu and Windows, so thumbs up. But I did not try with KDE yet. I fear Knotify will drive me crazy again. lol!
But keep on going. You are doing a great job and especially as there have various upstream bugs in the kernel, that should have increased it instead.
Are you referring to oS 12.1?
Yeah, pretty amazing.
I would second the power usage is better, AMD’s usually run a little hotter and my systems are running noticeably cooler.
I am using KDE
Thanks, it seems that my laptop’s 11.4 upgrade will happen sooner than I thought. 
I would second the power usage is better, AMD’s usually run a little hotter and my systems are running noticeably cooler.
I am using KDE
That is good to know. I wonder what optimizations have been done to achieve this? I guess it comes down mainly to kernel improvements perhaps? For now, I’ve held off upgrading, but this is one factor that would encourage me to upgrade earlier than I initially planned to.
^^deano_ferrari: I believe any difference may be due to the move from cpufrequtils to cpupowerutils.
I haven’t noticed any difference in power consumption. Mine still hovers around 1250-1300mA on idle.
Heat wise, I seem to be having major issues.
I am getting some crazy readings: 80+ degrees immediately on boot up, after which it never goes below 68…
With switchable graphics disabled, 58-59 is the lowest I have seen so far, usually in the low 60s.
This is much higher than previously, I rarely saw the machine go into high 50s let alone 60+…
I think this may be an issue with cpupowerutils’s governor and “turbo boost” - as I almost aways see a core or two over the rated 2.5GHz (i5 2520).
Nor for that matter do I see the frequency scaling down to the usual 800MHz, they rarely go that low and at idle they seem to sit at 1800.
I will see if I can get to the bottom of this in the next few days.
Just to add to this post.
To make sure I wasn’t being a paranoid hypochondriac, I popped in the 11.4 KDE LiveCD and temperature seems to be stable at 49 degrees (discreet disabled, 54 with the NVIDIA chip enabled). Although I am not sure how indicative this is of a real install, this is significantly better for me.
Interesting results being reported. I will keep an eye on this thread…
12.1 Gnome 3 on an optimus system, ASUS EeePC 1015pn here. Still using cpufreq-utils with laptopmod-tools, showing slightly over 50 degrees in Intel mode and just below 60 in nVidia mode. I was a little dissapointed first, battery showed around 930-950 mA in Intel mode, it used to be down to 800 in 11.4, but then I discovered that backlight is set to max by default, so I’m at up to 5.5 hours battery again. And all function keys work right out of the box, thanks!
i think:
A Proper Solution To The Linux ASPM Problem
“The Linux kernel power bug that caused high power usage for many Intel Linux systems has finally been addressed. Matthew Garrett of Red Hat has devised a solution for the ASPM Linux power problem by mimicking Microsoft Windows’ power behavior in the Linux kernel. A patch is on LKML for this solution to finally restore the battery life under Linux.”
… [Phoronix] A Proper Solution To The Linux ASPM Problem
Interesting. Thanks for the info.