The GNOME Power Management Daemon
In Ubuntu desktop environments, gsd-power (the GNOME Settings Daemon Power plugin) is an essential background service responsible for managing the power state of your computer. It monitors battery levels on laptops, triggers low-battery warnings, handles the logic for dimming the screen after a period of inactivity, and orchestrates suspend/hibernate actions when you close a laptop lid or press the physical power button.
While this daemon is critical for battery-powered laptops, it is often completely unnecessary—and sometimes problematic—on dedicated desktop workstations, headless servers running a graphical interface, or Virtual Machines. On a desktop PC plugged into a UPS, or a VM hosted in a cloud environment, you do not have a physical battery to monitor, and you rarely want the system to automatically suspend itself. If you manage your power states entirely via systemd (e.g., systemctl suspend) or want to ensure your desktop never automatically sleeps due to a graphical idle timer, you can disable the GNOME power daemon.
How to Disable the Gsd-power Service
Because gsd-power is a core plugin of the GNOME Settings Daemon, you cannot easily stop it with a standard systemctl stop command. The most reliable way to disable it is to prevent the binary from executing.
Warning: Disabling this will break automatic screen dimming, idle suspend, and battery monitoring in the Ubuntu top bar. Do not do this on a laptop.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal.
- To prevent the daemon from launching when GNOME starts, remove its execute permissions by running the following command:
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/gsd-power(Note: Depending on your specific Ubuntu version, the path might be /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-power).
- Restart your computer, or log out of your GNOME session and log back in.
Your Ubuntu system will no longer load the GNOME power management plugin, ensuring your machine stays awake and ignores GNOME-specific idle timers.