PowerDevil – power management service for KDE Plasma

PowerDevil is the power management service used by KDE Plasma. It works behind Plasma’s Power Management settings and coordinates desktop behaviour with the system’s available power-management facilities.

Rather than being a general hardware configuration utility, PowerDevil concentrates on session power policy. It reacts to user inactivity, battery conditions and hardware events, and cooperates with other Plasma components where responsibilities overlap. On Wayland, some display and activity-related work is handled by KWin while PowerDevil remains responsible for the wider power-management policy.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

  • Suspend or shut down a session in response to inactivity, lid closure or power-button events.
  • Adjust display and keyboard brightness and turn display backlights off when appropriate.
  • Apply different settings when running on mains power, battery power or a low battery.
  • Monitor battery charge and configure charge thresholds on supported hardware.
  • Track suspend and idle inhibitors, Plasma Activities and screen-locking state.
  • Integrate with UPower, power-profiles-daemon, ddcutil and systemd where available.
  • Provide a D-Bus interface used by other Plasma components.
  • Support DDC/CI brightness control for compatible external monitors through ddcutil.
  • Work with Plasma’s Power Management and Brightness & Color applets.
  • Leave unrelated tasks such as wireless airplane-mode control, disk mounting and audio configuration to other Plasma components.
  • Handle configurable actions for laptop lids and physical power-related buttons.
  • Coordinate with Plasma applets so battery, profile and brightness controls presented in the desktop reflect the service state.
  • Respect applications that inhibit idle or suspend behaviour when work must continue uninterrupted.

Website: github.com/KDE/powerdevil
Support:
Developer: KDE
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

PowerDevil is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.


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