Hello Linux community,

I need some help with shutting down my laptop when the battery reaches a low percentage.

I am using Debian 12 with the GNOME desktop. WARNING: Minimal installation with self selected packages.

What I want to achieve is, that the laptop just does a ‘halt -p’ or shuts itself down when the battery is below 20%.

What I did so far:

  • Look into GNOME settings in the power settings area and I found nothing helpful
  • I edited /etc/Upower/UPower.conf with my settings and changed the CriticalPowerAction to PowerOff, ensured the upower daemon is running via systemctl status and rebooted. The result was that I get a warning popup message in GNOME when the battery load reaches 21%, but it does not shutdown the laptop at 20% or under 20%, although I get another pop up announcing that the laptop would be shutdown
  • I ensured laptop-mode-tools and gnome-power-manager settings are installed

Any help/pointers for further help would be highly appreciated.

  • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    A bash script that checks the battery and if its below X runs shutdown -now ?

    Then run it every minute with cron.

    It’s not very elegant but it would work.

    • wolfOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Thanks, that would be a valid approach and my last resort.

      As you said, I hope someone knows a more elegant solution, though!

      • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        It’s also not dependant on any DE tool and won’t fuck up with any update that resets gnome configs. Trusty cron will prevail.

        With proper directory management I wouldn’t call it that inelegant tbh.