Consider battery charging thresholds and optimizations

Development
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It might be a good idea to to look at including the tlp and tlp-rdw packages

TLP supplies separate settings profiles for AC and battery power and
can enable or disable Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and WWAN radio devices upon
system startup.

Setting in the /etc/default/tlp config

# Sets the charge threshold to 80% similar to windows settings as to not overcharge the battery when AC is plugged in
TLP_BATTERY_CHARGE_THRESHOLDS="75 80"

# This sets the default screen display brightness when on battery to 75 and 100 when plugged in
TLP_DEFAULT_BRIGHTNESS_ON_AC=100
TLP_DEFAULT_BRIGHTNESS_ON_BAT=75

Another suggestion would be disabling “GNOME animations” which could
equal Improved Performance, Faster Response Time, and Battery Saving.

Adding these two lines to a custom dconf /etc/dconf/db/local.d/

[org/gnome/desktop/interface]
enable-animations = false

  • Notes about other DE optimizations (speed & performance)

Disable desktop effects (Linux Mint or Cinnamon Desktop Environment)

gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.effect show-desktop false

Disable compositing for full-screen windows xfce (may also apply to other Desktop Environments)

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/use_compositing -s false

(The global config or a user custom specific file should be located in /etc/xdg/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/)

Disabling compositing may improve performance for certain applications, especially games or video players, but it may also disable some visual effects and features like transparency and shadows. If you want to re-enable compositing later, you can follow the same steps and check the options again with “true” instead.

On KDE If you want to disable the compositor entirely (which will affect all windows, not just full-screen ones), you can do so with the following command:

kwriteconfig5 --file kwinrc --group 'Compositing' --key 'Enabled' 'false'
qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor suspend

To re-enable it, you can use:

kwriteconfig5 --file kwinrc --group 'Compositing' --key 'Enabled' 'true'
qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor resume
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Opinions welcome.

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First off, please, DO NOT paste random things from AI into a bug report or feature request that you send to ANY open-source project, without clearly and unambiguously marking it as AI-generated. All of the TLP options you mention don’t even exist or have different names than the ones shown here, and the option you show for “disabling desktop effects” on Cinnamon is badly mangled.

Rant over, as for the suggestions you mention here, I sadly have negative feedback on all of them. Some of them do potentially have merit, like disabling animations and compositors, but I’m worried that people will misinterpret those changes as bugs.

I personally do not like the idea of adding TLP. For some people it works great, but for others it can cause their system to be unstable and freeze or crash in certain situations. The way it works is it tweaks kernel-level settings to reduce power consumption, which can cause problems if the settings it enables aren’t compatible with your system for whatever reason. This is an annoyance at best, at worst it could be a security hole or open a security hole, if it chooses to tweak a setting that has security implications.

I’m somewhat adverse to this, for a couple of reasons:

  1. Kicksecure is using XFCE, not GNOME, so I don’t know if this will have any effect on the ISO or VM images. I haven’t seen any animations in the XFCE session. (We have no intention to switching to GNOME because of security concerns, see Dev/GNOME - Kicksecure)
  2. Some people are probably using Kicksecure with GNOME by way of using distribution morphing. I don’t think these people will expect all animations to be disabled when installing or upgrading Kicksecure. This could cause a lot of bug reports.

The correct command to use here is actually gsettings set org.cinnamon desktop-effects false I believe, though I haven’t tested this. I don’t really like this idea for the same reason I don’t like disabling GNOME animations - it’s not going to affect most Kicksecure systems at all, and on the systems it does effect, it could look like a bug.

Disable compositing for full-screen windows xfce (may also apply to other Desktop Environments)

That is not what that option does. That disables compositing entirely.

As for whether that’s desirable, I guess for some people it might be? The problem is that without compositing, some applications will render entirely wrong (this is most notable with GNOME Web / Epiphany, where it insists on trying to draw shadows even without a running compositor and you end up with massive solid black margins around some UI elements, I think Firefox may also do this). If this doesn’t break Firefox, it might be OK, but even that could cause serious problems for some users.

On KDE If you want to disable the compositor entirely (which will affect all windows, not just full-screen ones), you can do so with the following command:

I didn’t audit this command to see if it actually does what the post says. I know this causes problems with Firefox because it did for me just the other day, so I don’t think this is a good idea either. For reference, this is what my Kubuntu system does when you turn compositing off using Alt+Shift+F12 while Firefox is running:

Screenshot_20250122_093135
Screenshot_20250122_0931351920Ă—1200 104 KB

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Made this a new policy just now.

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Disclaimer: This post was made with AI so ignore it

can’t edit the post

Ok to sum it up:

  1. These TLP configs are not accurate or even valid. Sadly it appears there is no way to set battery charging thresholds and default brightness on linux reliably.

  2. Disable compositing can lead problems with shaders and UI elements of application windows.