Battery drains fast on Omarchy

An Omarchy laptop that empties in two hours is almost never one bug. It is a stack of small things: a power profile that was never applied, a screensaver that rasterizes on the CPU, and on hybrid laptops a discrete GPU that never sleeps. Everything below was checked against the v4.0.4 source tree, with v3.8.4 for comparison.

The fix

1. Check the profile actually applied, then set the one you want for battery.

powerprofilesctl get
omarchy powerprofiles list
omarchy powerprofiles set battery power-saver

Since 4.0.0 Omarchy remembers an explicit choice per power source. omarchy-powerprofiles-set writes it to ~/.local/state/omarchy/powerprofiles/battery (or /ac) and restores it next time you are in that state. Out of the box you get performance on AC and balanced on battery, so battery never drops to power-saver unless you ask. The system sleep chapter covers the same commands.

On 3.x there was no memory. The helper always picked balanced on battery, driven by udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-power-profile.rules. Those rules ran a script out of your home directory, and the 4.x migration 1788102906 removes or quarantines them. If you upgraded, confirm the profile still changes when you unplug.

2. Measure before you change anything.

omarchy battery status
sudo pacman -S powertop && sudo powertop

omarchy battery status prints percentage, time remaining, and instantaneous draw in watts, read from power_now in sysfs rather than UPower’s lagging average. Note the watts with the screen on and nothing running. Anything above roughly 10 W idle on a modern thin laptop means something is awake that should not be. Powertop’s overview tab names it.

3. Turn off the screensaver if you have a HiDPI or multi-monitor setup.

omarchy toggle screensaver

The screensaver starts after 150 seconds of idle by default and opens one fullscreen terminal per monitor at a hardcoded 120 frames per second. Omarchy’s shipped terminal is foot, which rasterizes on the CPU. markvogel measured 5.3 cores of CPU, a package temperature climb from 60 C to 97 C, and rising throttle counts on a three monitor Framework 13 in issue #9193. That is the single worst idle drain on the list and it fires while you are away from the machine.

Idle timings live in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json under idle, as screensaver and lock in seconds. The shipped defaults are 150 and 300.

4. On a hybrid NVIDIA laptop, check whether the dGPU is actually asleep.

cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/runtime_status
sudo lsof /dev/nvidia*

Use your own PCI address from lspci. If the status is active at idle, or Hyprland and the launcher hold the device open, the card is burning watts for nothing. That is issue #1776, where itsmedardan showed the dGPU never reaching d3cold and another reporter halved power draw after moving rendering to the iGPU. On supported laptops omarchy toggle hybrid gpu installs supergfxctl and switches modes. See hybrid GPU and NVIDIA drivers on Omarchy 4 first, because switching modes can cost you a session.

5. Close the power panel when you are done with it.

Leaving the panel open runs three helper processes every five seconds, one of which produces data the panel never displays. evo-social-world documented it in issue #7582, still open on 4.0.4. It is small, but it is exactly the kind of never stopping wakeup that keeps a CPU out of deep idle.

6. If you run the dev channel, update.

Dev builds of Quattro polled powerprofilesctl get every two seconds for the whole session. vstoyanov measured that at roughly 5 percent of a core and 111 ms of CPU per call in issue #11058. dhh swapped the Python CLI for a busctl property read in PR #11637, merged 2026-09-13; the two second timer stays, but each tick is a cheap D-Bus call instead of an interpreter start. The battery service in the tagged 4.0.x trees has no such timer at all, so this only matters on dev or an older dev checkout.

Verify it worked

Unplug, leave the machine idle at the desktop with the lid open, wait a minute, then run omarchy battery status twice about 30 seconds apart. You want a stable watt figure, not a moving one. Compare it with what you noted in step 2.

Then confirm the profile survives a plug cycle:

powerprofilesctl get   # while unplugged
powerprofilesctl get   # again, a few seconds after plugging in

If nothing changes on unplug, the shell’s battery service is not firing. It reacts to UPower.onBattery, so check busctl get-property org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower OnBattery while unplugged.

Why it happens

Omarchy ships one power daemon and nothing else. install/omarchy-base.packages lists power-profiles-daemon, and install/config/enable-services.sh enables it. There is no TLP, no laptop-mode-tools, no disk or PCIe tuning. Intel machines with a battery additionally get thermald, and Alder Lake and newer hybrid Intel CPUs get intel-lpmd, both from install/hardware/intel/. That is the whole of it. Arch with a bare profile daemon idles higher than a vendor tuned Windows install, which is what reports like issue #8648 describe. Automatic switching on plug and unplug only arrived in 3.4.0; before that, people wired it up themselves with udev rules, as in discussion #933.

Two shipped defaults deliberately spend power. Wi-Fi power save is switched off in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/omarchy-wifi-powersave.conf, and the file says why: it trades a fraction of a watt for avoiding latency spikes and broken Intel BE200 firmware. A migration turns it off on running interfaces too. The USB autosuspend file every 4.0.x release ships at /etc/modprobe.d/omarchy-usb-autosuspend.conf sets a usbcore option that cannot apply, because usbcore is built into the kernel, which jordanglean documented in issue #12095. So USB devices keep whatever the udev hwdb gives them.

The low battery warning is a warning only. The shell’s battery service checks every 30 seconds and, at 10 percent while discharging, runs omarchy-battery-low, which sends the “Time to recharge!” notification and fires the battery-low hook. Drop an executable script in ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/battery-low.d/ to add your own action. There is a play-warning-sound.sample to copy. Nothing in that path reduces power draw or suspends the machine for you.

One more failure mode worth ruling out: the profile may never have applied at boot. In issue #8184, on a machine upgraded from 3.x that still carried the old 99-power-profile.rules, the udev event fired before power-profiles-daemon had started, the helper exited 1, and the machine stayed on whatever profile was left over. A clean 4.x install has no udev rule; the shell applies the profile when UPower reports a change. journalctl -b | grep powerprofiles shows either path.

If that did not work

Consider TLP, with your eyes open. pomartel’s guide in discussion #3907 replaces power-profiles-daemon with tlp plus tlp-pd and symlinks powerprofilesctl to tlpctl. It works, and TLP tunes far more than CPU governors. But the two daemons conflict and cannot both be installed, as pomartel put it in the accepted answer on discussion #4768. Worse on 4.x: when the daemon is masked, powerprofilesctl crashes with SIGABRT instead of failing cleanly, and the shell calls it from the power panel, the menu, and every AC transition. That is ogrt’s issue #8596, open as of 2026-09-16. Note that tlp-pd was not in the Arch repos for at least one reader of that guide, and pomartel later wrote in the same thread that he went back to power-profiles-daemon because TLP caused odd issues when not tuned carefully.

Check the battery itself. omarchy battery status prints the full charge capacity in watt hours; compare it with the design capacity in /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full_design. A cell at half its design capacity drains twice as fast and no software fixes that. On dual battery laptops the readout covers only the first battery: omarchy-battery-status takes the first UPower BAT device, so a ThinkPad with an internal and an external pack shows one of them.

Look for a single runaway process. A stuck Chromium tab, a compile loop, or an agent CLI left running will beat every tweak on this page. btop ships by default.

The drains with measurements attached are the screensaver, the dGPU, and the dev channel poll. If you measure something else, open an issue with omarchy debug output attached.

Related

• Suspend will not resume from s2idle
• Hibernate fails or hangs
• Battery and power hardware notes
• Hybrid GPU laptops
• Suspend and sleep
• Omarchy commands reference