Linux Laptop Power Saving Tips: White on Black Color, Sleep vs Hibernate

Xah Lee, 2012-08-31

when using a laptop under bright sunlight, it's often better to have black screen, like in Terminal screen.

• For emacs, start it like this: emacs -rv
• For Firefox, you can install a add-on. Search for “firefox invert colors add-on”. Or this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blank-your-monitor-easy-readin/
• For Google Chrome, use Google official extension “High Contrast” at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/djcfdncoelnlbldjfhinnjlhdjlikmph

It's also a good idea to set your desktop background to completely black or some dark image.

If you are using linux, use Xfce or LXDE as your desktop. They are less power hungry than {KDE, Gnome}. 〔☛ Linux: How to Install New Window Manager (Gnome, KDE, Xfce, xmonad, …)〕

What's the Difference Between Sleep and Hibernation?

Sleep mode, also known as Suspend, Standby, puts your laptop to a low power mode to save battery consumption. What it does is like a “pause”. The monitor is turned off, and RAM (memory) chip gets minimal power to sustain its data. Computer can quickly resume from sleep mode.

Hibernation mode saves more energy. It is similar to a complete power off. It saves RAM (memory) content to disk, and powers down spinning hard disk. However, hibernation takes longer time to wake up.

Linux: Put Machine to Sleep by Command Line

See: Linux: Put Machine to Sleep by Command Line.