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]English
    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.

    • @wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      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]English
        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.

    • @wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      Thanks, this would indeed solve my problem. Still hoping for a better solution, but if everything else fails I’ll utilize it!