Arch Linux

evorster

Member

Registered: 2020-07-07

Posts: 91

Introducing Dynamic Power Daemon - Automatically switch power profiles

A little background info...

I have a gaming laptop, and I run Arch on it. When unplugged, it drains its battery fast. When plugged in, it is noisy as hell when in anything but powersave mode, but then when I actually want to use the hardware that I paid a lot of money for, I would first have to go set another profile.

I worked through the list of power managers in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
The best of the lot is Power Profiles Daemon, but even that is woefully basic.

And so nothing truly scratched this itch.
So, I started scratching this itch by writing a lot of bash scripts, extending ppd, but ran into the limitations of that approach fairly quick.
Then, I re-wrote the thing in Python, but ran into unmaintained packages for dbus.

So, finally I re-wrote the thing in C++ and Qt. Even then, power-profiles-daemon did not do the things I wanted, and did things I did not want.
**sigh**
So, I re-implemented profile switching and now my package conflicts with ppd.
An unfortunate side effect is that now you don't get the little leaf and rocket displayed on your panel icon for power management in KDE. This package does, however, expose a dbus interface which exposes the same sort of information that power profiles daemon exposes...

It also has a UI and a panel button that makes using it easy, and non-intrusive.

With all that, I'm introducing: Dynamic Power Daemon:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dynamic-power-daemon

It runs fine on my machine, and does what I want and seems pretty extensible.
There are two other laptops with Arch and CachyOS on in this household, and I tested the application on them too, and sorted any issues that popped up.

Now I am looking for people who want to test this software on their machines.
Specifically: People running KDE on Arch, or Arch-based distros, on high performance laptops to try this out.
You should be able to run it on older or less performant hardware, but the features and benefits might be more limited.

People with a bit of skill to give me feedback on things that I can do differently, or issues and corner cases that need to be addressed.

The github for this project is here:
https://github.com/evertvorster/dynamic-power-daemon

There is a manual here:
https://github.com/evertvorster/dynamic … _manual.md

Further down the line there are still a couple of features that I want to add, and any more suggestions are welcome.

Eventually, when we sorted all the immediate issues, I would like for this project to be added to the Arch Wiki for wider testing.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

I don't have wiki access, and don't particularly want it either.
The time for this to be added there is if one of the people in the Arch community with Wiki Access feels like adding it.

Last edited by evorster (2025-08-14 02:45:03)