A few questions and request for general recommendations (Taniks/Alder Lake)

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Hi, I recently corebooted my Taniks and installed Arch on an NVMe drive, and I have a few questions/support requests, so I thought I’d drop them in the same topic for someone who’s more knowledgeable about the platform:

-Audio doesn’t seem to work after running the audio script, unless I enable it in Pipewire “pro audio” mode from the KDE settings, which exposes four more audio interfaces than I actually have. It doesn’t have a consumer mode. Am I stuck like this?

-Taniks has an RGB keyboard, but Linux and ectool only seem to expose basic lighting settings that make it display pure white. Is this feature supported at all? Obviously not a deal breaker, but I appreciate being able to show off the irony of this laptop having a rainbow keyboard.

-Wayland seems to detect an extra display called “Unknown-1” that is the same resolution as the laptop’s internal display and has its refresh rate limited to 60hz, but displaying something to it doesn’t actually do anything. What is it? Just curious.

-Any power management tips besides using power-profiles-daemon/your power manager of choice? Should I generally expect similar battery life to ChrOS given the same workload (Chromium-centric, a few Linux apps, very light gaming, 60hz)? Or is there Google open-secret sauce that helps squeeze out extra battery life on their system?

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Update: found the rgb settings in ectool :smiley:

also my bad for missing the Post Install section, I knew about and had used the audio and USB fixes but I didn’t know about Chrultrabook-Tools

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About the battery - in my experience using the default GNOME/KDE power-profiles-daemon in “balanced” mode results in around the same power usage as on ChromeOS (although I don’t have experience with gaming Chromebooks). I don’t think Google has any secret sauce (and I think ChromeOS may even have worse battery life than Linux sometimes).

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Thanks for the SuzyQ! I had the same suspicion. Came across people who poo-poohed Linux’s power management on Chromebooks, was confused because I figured they’d be similar. Looked into what Cros does myself and it seems like they did their power management services in house but are still generally reliant on the kernel to be efficient.

I have a feeling they just don’t know to install PPD.

As for the “gaming” part, these are just normal Chromebooks. The only difference is that the keyboards are rainbow :stuck_out_tongue:

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Idk about taniks but I know some “gaming Chromebooks” have P-series CPUs which have a higher TDP than U-series and bigger, high refresh screens which might consume more power.