Using a new laptop with a confirmed healthy battery, do you typically need to do battery calibration after a fresh distro install? Or is that only used when replacing a battery on an existing system?

By battery calibration I mean the multiple cycles of letting battery drain to 0% and then recharging back up to 100%.

Thanks in advance!

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 months ago

    There’s two things you might be talking about here:

    The old way of making sure nickel cadmium batteries didn’t degrade, which was to discharge them all the way and charge them back up all the way. Your new laptop is almost certainly using lithium ion batteries which are chemically “damaged” more through that process than just leaving them plugged up all the time.

    You could be talking about the old way of dealing with charge controllers, where the controller relied on the bios or os to tell it what to do and didn’t “know” how to respond to batteries at different stages of charge. This hasn’t been the situation for like fifteen years. Nowadays charge controllers go “yup, ready to go boss, 12345mah of charge, 90%” when some bios or os polls them.

    You don’t even need to manually keep your battery in the 20-80 range nowadays since almost every charge controller automatically monitors temperature and adjusts charging parameters to not damage the battery. It’s not like the old days where the charge controller was just an ic controlling a fet acting as a slucegate between the battery and the power brick.

    Heck, lithium ion batteries nowadays last longest the longer they’re plugged in. Running them to <10% every charge cycle actually diminishes battery life!

    Tldr welcome to the future, don’t worry about it!