What is Upower?
Upower is a lightweight command line and library tool for power management in Linux. It provides an abstraction layer for dealing with power devices such as batteries, AC power adapters, USB power devices, and so on.
Some key features of Upower include:
- Device enumeration - Upower detects power devices on the system and collects info like type, state of charge, energy rate, etc.
- Standardized interface - It exposes all device info through DBus API and command line tools for easy integration.
- Notifications - Client applications can subscribe to events like low battery warnings, etc.
- Portable - Being based on DBus and GLib, Upower integrates well with GNOME and most Linux desktop environments.
- Lightweight - Small codebase with minimal dependencies make it lightweight and fast.
Some common use cases of Upower include battery monitoring in system tray apps, displaying power usage graphs in settings tools, integrating power management actions in desktop environments like auto-sleep on low battery, handling USB power device events, and more.
RMClock, PowerTOP, Processor Hardware Control for Linux, Laptop Mode Tools, Jupiter Applet, CPUMSR, Granola, Faronics Power Save, SmartPower, Verdiem, Boray POWer, cbatticon are some alternatives to Upower.