Discover TUXEDO Control Center, a sleek Linux application to manage your laptop fans and power

PC maker TUXEDO Computers – which you may hear more and more about thanks to the explosion of Manjaro Linux laptops – has developed a nifty system utility called TUXEDO Control Center. In short, it allows you to adjust and manage all the different power settings of your laptop with one central application.

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

For me, the real appeal of Tuxedo Control Center is the ridiculously easy way to create custom thermal profiles. It comes with a few default settings which basically correspond to “Performance, Balanced, and Power Saving”, but you can really dig and limit the number of processor cores, set minimum and maximum processor clock speeds, and tweak the basic behavior of the fan.

In addition, you can set each profile separately for battery or connection use.

What about dark mode? Well you must have dark mode!

This is only version 1.0.1, but additional features are planned like keyboard lighting and more granular settings to create custom fan curves. We can also expect additional security and convenience features like touchpad control and various desktop changes over time.

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

Tuxedo Control Center is currently developed as free and open source software under the GPLv3 license, which means that all of the source code is available for you to view, suggest changes, and even forge it for your own project.

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

Installation is simple, but it requires either building it from source or adding up to four repositories (if you have Nvidia

NVDA
graphics) then doing sudo apt install tuxedo-control-center. Hopefully the community can pack it in deb, snap, and flatpak formats so newbies can easily get started.

WATCH IT IN ACTION:

This utility is still in its infancy, but it adds another layer of value to Tuxedo systems – and ultimately, it looks to evolve into a convenient system utility and power profiler for all experienced laptop users. Linux.