Power and battery

Hub → Power is one panel over everything that decides how much energy the machine uses and what it does when you leave it alone.

Laptop or desktop #

Machine → Type is the switch that reseeds every other setting on this page at once. Laptop gives you separate behaviour on wall power and on battery, a lid action, and the battery controls. Desktop gives one gentle set of idle timers, ignores the lid, and hides the battery section because there is nothing to show.

It is normally detected for you, and worth changing only if the detection got your hardware wrong. A value you set deliberately survives the switch — if something looks stuck after changing the type, that is why: it is your choice, not a preset. w-reset power clears the lot back to W's defaults.

Power profile #

Profile is Performance, Balanced or Power saver. Only the profiles the hardware actually supports are offered — Performance needs a platform driver that many desktops and virtual machines do not have, and its absence is not a fault.

Auto-switch (AC/battery) hands the choice to the power source: balanced while plugged in, power saver on battery. Turn it off if you would rather pick by hand.

Idle: lock, then screen off, then suspend #

The three idle timers are a chain, not three separate stopwatches, and reading them that way is the difference between the settings doing what you expect and looking broken:

• Auto-lock (idle) counts from your last keypress or mouse move.
• Screen off (after lock) counts from the moment the lock fired.
• Suspend (after screen off) counts from the moment the screen went dark.

So 5 / 2 / 10 means: lock after five minutes, screen off two minutes later, suspend ten minutes after that. Each row shows the resulting absolute time underneath it, so you never have to do the arithmetic yourself. Setting a value to zero switches that link off and the next one counts from the previous live link instead.

On a laptop there are two independent sets — Idle — on AC and Idle — on battery — and the battery one is deliberately more aggressive.

Keyboard backlight off (idle) sits in the same section but is not part of the chain: it is its own timer counting from your last activity, and the light comes back the moment you touch anything.

Two behaviours worth knowing about, both intentional:

• The machine always locks before it suspends, so it never resumes to an unlocked desktop — and it waits for the lock screen to finish appearing before it actually goes to sleep, so you see the whole thing draw rather than a half-faded flash. In a terminal, use w-power sleep rather than systemctl suspend to get that same behaviour. Closing the lid suspends through systemd rather than through W, so there the lock screen simply appears without the fade — the animation would not be visible with the lid shut, and skipping it is what keeps a half-drawn locker off the screen you come back to.
• Once the screen is locked, nudging the mouse blanks the display again after the screen-off delay rather than leaving it lit.

Super+L locks immediately.

Idle timers are per-account: two people on one machine legitimately have different ones.

Lid and power button #

On a laptop, Lid sets what closing the lid does, separately On battery and On AC — suspend, lock, nothing, or power off. Power button → When pressed does the same for the button: the power menu, suspend, power off, or nothing.

If your machine suspends and then wakes a few seconds later on its own, W already handles the usual cause — on some firmware an open lid keeps asserting a wake signal, so W removes it for the duration of a suspend that started with the lid open and puts it back afterwards. Closing the lid still wakes the machine as it should.

Battery #

Status shows the charge and, where the firmware reports it, the battery's health — its current full capacity against its original one.

Charge limit caps charging below 100%. A battery kept at 80% ages noticeably more slowly than one held full, which is worth it for a laptop that lives on a desk; set it to Full before a trip. The cap is re-applied after every resume, because firmware tends to forget it. On hardware that does not expose the setting the control does nothing, and there is no way around that from software.

The bar shows the battery block only where there is a battery.

Shutting down #

Super+Backspace opens the power menu: Lock, Logout, Suspend, Reboot, Shutdown.

Logout, reboot and shutdown go the polite way: W asks each window to close, so an editor gets to show its save dialog, and if you cancel that dialog the whole shutdown is called off rather than pushed through. That is why the power menu is the better route than a raw systemctl poweroff — unsaved work cannot be lost by accident.

From a terminal the settings on this page are w-power, and the keyboard backlight itself is w-kbdlight.

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