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On Windows, Dell Power Management drivers are available for laptops for maximizing the health of battery.

Due to drivers on Windows, Desktop Mode and Logetivity mode are available for maximizing battery health.

  1. Are these Dell drivers available on Ubuntu?
  2. Are there any alternatives to enable these modes in Ubuntu?
  3. Any other suggestions regarding Power Management for Ubuntu?

I am using Ubuntu 16.04 64bit on Dell Inspiron 5521.

a1ighalib
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5 Answers5

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Dell provides a command line tool ("command configure" a.k.a. cctk) to get/set BIOS config (including battery and charge related values).

https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln311302/dell-command-configure?lang=en

I've used this tool to modify the charge start/end threshold on 18.04LTS.

sg23
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Some power management tools pm-utils are installed by default.

You can install laptop-mode-tools to use extended power management features by

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

This package will do most of power saving automatically, but you can tune it using config files.

For Ubuntu 16.04 pm-tools and laptop-mode-tools do not automatically detect events of switchng from battery to AC because of systemd limitations. This can be fixed in udev.

For the details see this answer for details.

In addition you can use powertop to check power settings.

Community
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Pilot6
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TL;DR: I created an open source app specifically for that

I run into the same issue some time ago. Unfortunately, it seems that even in 2023 dell did not provide official GUI app like "Dell Power Manager" on Windows. As one of the answers above suggested, one option is to use Dell's CCTK CLI, which dell luckily provides for both Windows and Linux.

I have thus created an open source app based on CLI to control charge modes and thermal management modes on Dell laptops. It still missing some features of Dell's official app (eg. weekly scheduling of charging) but you can enable % threshold charging, which is most important for preserving battery life. Hope this comes handy to someone!

alex.vin
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You can use the Dell command line tool stated before.

This would be the command you've been looking for:

sudo /opt/dell/dcc/cctk --primarybatterycfg=custom:60-80
Niels
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If you have the official DELL CLI app than there is a ready to use KDE plasma plasmoid (widget) https://store.kde.org/p/2097829. You can place it in your desktop/panels. You can even find and install it directly from plasma widget search.

It will provide a tray icon as well indicating the battery mode chosen trayIcon

Sebastian Tur
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