I have a 2015 macbook pro (the 3,1 ghz i7 one).
I did a thermal repaste last year.
I run ubuntu from an sd card and installed autocpu-freq (and maybe thermald) due to google gemini reccomendation.
My feeling is that it run better without them, just with stock config.
Now the fan randomly kicks in and the macbook still gets hot.
Should I uninstall them?
Switched to 26.04 and everything's been running smoothly. I use it mostly for development in Rust and TS.
Memory management is top tier, and is a huge improvement from 24.04, especially when running NeoVim for some reason. NVidia drivers were installed automatically during setup. Got 595.58.03. The switch from X11 to Wayland was also a breeze (surprisingly?). Everything like Slack screen sharing, audio in/out, Hangouts calls-- it just worked.
But really, the biggest difference for me is battery life and power management. I now use fractional scaling 150% instead of 200%, because it is now finally stable, and immediately gained more FPS for literally everything. Full battery life would average at around 2h during heavy lifting (mostly compiling and running a bunch of Docker containers). It went up to 6h. I thought this might have been a calibration thing or an issue with temperature probes, but today is my second day with 26.04, and I'm at 50% after 3h of heavy usage, again.
One thing I noticed is the fans are almost always off, or running softly during heavier tasks.
Maybe it's a combination of the Wayland, new Nvidia drivers, new kernel, better fractional scaling-- but the battery life of this laptop literally tripled.
Anybody has a similar story? Did I have a cursed Ubuntu 24.04 install?