this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Laptop battery goes flat, when powered off, only on Debian (lemmy.ml)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml to c/linuxhardware@programming.dev
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Hi all,

I had this laptop (Lenovo Carbon X1 Gen 6), and when it had Debian, it would just go flat on sleep, and even when powered off. So strange. I checked all BIOS settings etc, but could never figure it out.

I moved it to Fedora, and it was perfect. Battery life was boosted like crazy, acted as it was meant to.

However, I have tomove away from Fedora, due to them dropping X11 (it's an accessibility issue I'm facing with my tools) and I forgot about said issue with Debian.

Back on Debian now, woke up, powered on laptop, which was fully charged last night, and it's flat again.

What is it, that Debian is doing differently, that is making it go flat, when powered off?

Please note, I am doing a proper shutdown. Not just closing lid, sleep, hybernate, etc.

Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

UPDATE: I booted into a fedora live disk, and shutdown. This time the battery did not go flat at all when shutdown, indicating that it is absolutely debian related, not BIOS or anything else.

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[–] glitching@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (6 children)

holup - you shut down the laptop and in such a state it drains the battery?! I mean, that's so outside of the OS' functionality, it don't matter which one you got. the only sensible conclusion is that shutting down the laptop in debian doesn't turn it off, there are no other explanations.

fedora is more modern by way of kernels and DEs and whatnot, but I've looked up your hardware, that's an 8th gen i5/i7, that's plently supported even in old bookworm.

one thing to lookup is in BIOS, my T480s (same generation) had a power management setting in BIOS that was either Windows or Linux, so make sure yours is set correctly.

edit: to add, the other issue, standby, blows on any hardware I've tried so what you need to do is implement suspend-then-hibernate by setting up a swap file that's RAM + 4 GB (or RAM * 1.5, if you run zram) and then enabling first hibernation and then configuring suspend-then-hibernate. so in that setup, your laptop sleeps normally, and if you don't touch it in say an hour, it dumps the RAM to the SSD and powers off. when you power it on, it restores from swap and that's faster than cold boot and your shit is how you left it.

naturally, alla that's pointless until you fix issue #1, the drain when it's supposedly off.

[–] sneezycat@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

the only sensible conclusion is that shutting down the laptop in debian doesn't turn it off, there are no other explanations.

I mean, there are other explanations, like having Wake on Lan activated. But yeah it is very suspicious. It shouldn't drain that fast, even with WoL.

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

OK, a little bit of an update. I booted into the fedora live USB disk. I then shut down from there. A day later, and the battery is still on 98%. This shows that it is actually debian causing the issue, not a system issue like the BIOS or similar. Now, just to try and figure out what it is with Debian and shutdown.

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