Last year I got a brand new Dell Latitude 5410 laptop. It had Ubuntu preinstalled, and I started to use it, as I use Ubuntu for about 10 years. I was very happy with the new laptop especially because it was completely quiet. When I run my usual programs (Chrome, Thunderbird, Skype, some terminals), the CPU remains so cool that the fan almost never even starts.
I like Ubuntu, but I have problems with it sometimes. The other day I wondered if there exists a distribution without these little riddles, and just works. After some reading about distros claimed to be quite stable, I tried OpenSUSE. I like it very much so far, but the problem that will likely make me abandon it is the following:
It makes the CPU warm, even if I don’t run anything. Not very hot, just enough warm to start the fan. Sometimes the fan can cool it down in about 10 minutes, then after 5 minutes it warms up again, sometimes the fan runs constantly.
I looked at the CPU usage with top. In both cases (Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) the sum of %CPU column is about 2-5%. In Ubuntu, if Chrome uses 10-20% CPU, it still stays cool and quiet. In OpenSUSE, with 1-2% of CPU usage, the CPU temperature rises above 50dC, and the fan starts.
I looked at the CPU frequencies. In both cases the frequency is usually set to be low (0.8 GHz), and it goes up a little for seconds.
I would appreciate any ideas that could solve it, and make me give OpenSUSE a try for a longer time.
Thanks.
(Another interesting unsolved thermal issue I had lately: I tried Pop OS too. It made the chip under my right palm so hot that it was very uncomfortable. It is slightly warm in Ubuntu and now in OpenSUSE.)
Are you sure that the fans are starting due to the CPU temperature?
My Clevo notebook has a NVIDIA Optimus configuration. As soon as i allow the NVIDIA card to be active all fans will start to work (and will not stop until i switch the NVIDIA card off and use only the build-in Intel graphics).
Quite sure. I’m watching the temperature sensor’s value with the Freon Gnome extension, and I see that the fan starts approximately at 55dC, and stops at 45dC. Sometimes the temperature settles about 50dC, and the fan goes constantly.
Does your CPU support some sort of “turbo” mode (i.e. running on a higher frequency for a certain period of time)? And if so will it be switched into that mode by some actions (e.g.start of firefox or start of thunderbird)?
In that case you could use cpupower to limit your CPU to its base frequency.
Yes, it does support. The frequency can jump to higher values for seconds, when needed.
Thank you for the hint. I tried to hard limit CPU frequency to a low value (800 MHZ, that is half of the base frequency) with cpupower. It became slow, because couldn’t jump to higher freqency when it shuould. But did’t get cooler when idle.
Usually openSUSE is cooler than other Linux distros because of using “tlp” package by default for laptops.
Notebook is rather new, try to use TW and Leap 15.3 - maybe these have some updates.
Possibly Dell made some enhancements for preinstalled Ubuntu - ask tech support about it.
Yes, you’re right. Comparing two distributions is like comparing two things that differ in many ways. I’d be happy if I knew what exactly is the component that differs in these two distros, and causes this issue. But I don’t know, this is the question here.
I tried Ubuntu and OpenSUSE with Gnome DE, because it’s the one I like.
The CPU temperature sensor shows higher value in SUSE.
Maybe the CPU has more work to do, because the GPU or some other hw can’t help him. But the mistery for me is that why can’t I see in top that the CPU works more.
I see that the CPU doesn’t work more, doesn’t run at higher frequency, but makes more heat.
I also thought about that the preinstalled Ubuntu can be some special distro for this hardware. So I tried an offficial original Ubuntu, and it was nice cool too!
Probably some other component (which is placed close to the CPU) heats up and so becomes responsible for a higher CPU temperature.
I don’t know the Freon Gnome extension which you mentioned but does it tell you the temperature of other components (GPU, SSD, HDD, Wifi, …) as well?
On my notebook i use GKrellM to monitor the temperature and it shows that my NVME-device can become very hot (> 60°C while indexing the drive) and if that happens the temperature of the CPU and the Wifi card will start rising as well.
One possibility is that the CPU frequency governors have different tuning in openSUSE and Ubuntu.
While I have not seen noticeable differences on the HW I use most of the time, I have a feeling that openSUSE try to use the highest available frequency for a short time, then send a core to sleep if not needed, while some other distro might prefer to use a lower average frequency for a longer time (but I have no proof at the moment, just food for thought). If that is the case, some CPU model and/or some BIOS firmware might react with a higher average power dissipation and you wouldn’t notice from TOP statistics.
Writing this from a freshly installed Tumbleweed. It depends on what you mean by “stability”.
Will you have crashes or similar with TW? Not likely, each snapshot is fully tested before being published.
Will you have more updates and changes in packages? Definitely, be prepared to download big chunks if you want to keep your system fully updated.
Will you have occasional hiccups? Not very likely, but happens from time to time. For instance, I lost bluetooth on this machine when kernel was updated to 5.10.x (but keeping an older kernel can solve many such problems).
You can add the Kernel Head repo in 15.2 and use the latest kernel
I use Tumbleweed but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. I’m reasonably experienced I think.
Thing I’d say is, you get used to TW and can live with / manage with some of it’s nuances
I would recommend Kernel:/stable instead, currently featuring 5.10.11 that is already ahead of Tumbleweed but has reasonable “stability”.
Kernel:/HEAD features 5.11.rc5 which is not yet ready for general use IMHO.