Power management issue with Linux desktops

Power management in Linux mint desktop does not kick in when the system is booted upon, it only starts up when the cinnamon desktop is logged into. This should not be the case because when the system is powered up and left untouched, the brightness settings does not work, battery management settings doesn’t work. When this is the case battery gets drained completely.

By default in power manager settings, system is configured to take critical battery action only when 2 minutes of power is remaining. Thus most people wouldn’t have noticed the seriousness of this problem. I configured my system to take critical battery action when battery is at 25 % by modifying the dconf-editor settings and confirming this is the case.

I have reported a bug to Linux mint in launchpad here https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1155691

If you are facing this bug, please add a comment against this bug.

I’m afraid this is how gnome3 desktop behaves too. This must affect all the linux distributions using cinnamon and gnome3 desktop. At this moment i have no idea what are all the distributions affected. If your version of linux is affected, please report it to your distributions authors at the appropriate place.

I guess this is more of a design error than of a bug

configure battery power settings in Gnome

Gnome desktop does not allow users to set the values for battery critical state, Power settings will only allow users to set what action is to be taken when the battery is critical. By default it is considered critical when battery backup time is  5 minutes and it will initiate battery critical action when backup time remaining is 2 minutes. This default behavior is questionable because 2 minutes will not be sufficient for all users to find a power source and as most batteries used today are lithium-ion batteries, their life will get significantly reduced by this default behavior when drained so low so often.

Fortunately, this can be changed in configuration editor. systems using older Gnome versions such as Gnome2 desktops had a tool called Gconf-editor to change these configuration settings. Newer Gnome versions such as systems using Gnome3 desktop use a tool called dconf-editor to make changes to these configuration settings.Install this tool by using below command from terminal

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

After installing open dconf-editor and look for following path in the left pane

/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power/

In the right pane look for the fields,

time-action

time-critical

time-low

and change the time values for the fields according to your preferences.Note that the time is defined in seconds.

Description for the fields and the type of value it accepts will be available at the bottom pane, when you select the fields.

Alternatively, if you want your system to consider the battery percentage instead of remaining time, uncheck the key

use-time-for-policy

and modify the keys

percentage-action

percentage-critical

percentage-low

to your preference.Now your system should take the values you defined after the next boot or restart your system for the settings to take effect immediately.