Get Control Of Your Linux Laptop With TUXEDO Control Center

PC manufacturer TUXEDO Computers — which you may be increasingly hearing about thanks to the Manjaro Linux laptop explosion — have developed a slick system utility called TUXEDO Control Center. In short, it allows you tune and manage all the various power settings of your laptop with one central app.

There's also a dashboard that monitors your system fans, CPU and GPU loads and temperatures.

For me, the true appeal of Tuxedo Control Center is the ridiculously easy way you can create custom thermal profiles. It comes with a few default ones which basically amount to "Performance, Balanced and Power Saving" but you can really dig in and limit the number of CPU cores, establish minimum and maximum CPU clock speeds, and tweak basic fan behavior.

Plus you can separately tune each profile for plugged in or battery usage.

And dark mode? Well you've gotta have dark mode!

This is just version 1.0.1 but extra features are being planned like keyboard illumination and more granular settings to create custom fan curves. We can also look forward to additional security and comfort features, such as touchpad control and various time-dependent changes to the desktop.

The app is shipping now with all Tuxedo systems, but I've used it on non-Tuxedo systems using both Pop OS 20.04 beta and Ubuntu 18.04.

Tuxedo Control Center is currently being developed as free and open source software under the GPLv3 license, which means that the entire source code is available for you to view, propose changes to, and even fork for your own project.

The source code for the TUXEDO Control center can be found on their official GitHub repository.

Installing this is straightforward, but it does require either building it from source, or adding up to four repositories (if you have Nvidia graphics) and then doing sudo apt install tuxedo-control-center. Hopefully the community can package this into deb, snap and flatpak formats so that it's simple for newbies to get up and running.

WATCH IT IN ACTION:

It's early days for this utility, but it adds another layer of value to Tuxedo systems — and ultimately it's looking to evolve into a handy system utility and power profiler for all Linux laptop power users.

Linux App Spotlight: TUXEDO Control Center