I recently upgraded my 13" Framework laptop from an Intel Intel i7-1165G7 to an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. The only thing that’s really bothered me about the Framework laptop is its battery life. There are a lot of tools available for optimizing power management – tlp, powertop, power-profile-daemon, etc – but I had an idea for a quick and easy win.

When I’m plugged into a power source, I want maximum performance. When I’m on battery, I want maximum battery life. I don’t want to have to manually switch between power profiles. I don’t want to have to think about it.

So I wrote dynamic-power-profile, a simple daemon written in Rust that monitors the power state via dbus and changes the power profile accordingly. It’s available via crates.io.

Right now it’s highly opinionated. It requires dbus. It runs under systemd. When on power, it will set the profile to performance, if available, or balanced. If you’re on battery, it will set the profile to power-saver.

It’s been tested and works on Bluefin and GNOME but should work on any Linux/x86 system with dbus.

Next steps:

• measure battery life on battery life on different profiles
• setup Github Actions to build tagged releases
  • figure out how to publish new versions to brew
• make the power profile configurable
• add the ability to execute custom commands based on power state, e.g., change the screen brightness automatically