GNOME Power-Profiles-Daemon Taking Shape For Better System/Laptop Power Controls

The GNOME Power Profiles Daemon (power-profiles-daemon) has begun taking shape over the past few weeks for ultimately allowing better controls over system power preferences with different profiles.

Longtime GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has been developing power-profiles-daemon this summer for supporting power profiles handling and exposing it via D-Bus. The intended power profiles at this point are "balanced", "power-saver", and "performance" but the performance profile ultimately will only have any bearing on systems with hardware capable of being set to be optimized for performance.

The daemon will set various attributes like the USB fast-charging state and other hardware tunables but also to alter some desktop-level preferences like more aggressive display power management handling during inactivity. The "balanced" mode is the planned default. This daemon is a bit similar to Feral's GameMode but that it's intended more about power conservation and tuning rather than simply trying to get the best performance for a given task like gaming.

The GNOME mock-up around the user interface controls from the Control Center for power handling.

This GNOME solution is being developed since existing solutions like thermald are either Intel-focused, don't offer much customization, or have other limitations around GNOME desktop integration.

Those wanting to check out the in-progress daemon work can do so via this Git repository.

The latest work being explored is on AMDGPU power-savings/performance tunables.