TLP Panel is a GTK4 / libadwaita app for Linux laptops. It reads the kernel's own power interfaces and drives TLP — the battery-life tool that ships with most distributions.
It is published as a .deb package for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 or
newer, and runs on any desktop, GNOME or otherwise.
Linux only. Everything it reads lives in
/sysand/run/tlp, and everything it changes goes through TLP. There is no Windows or macOS build, and nothing to port — those systems have neither.
TLP has no interface. It is excellent and invisible: a set of rules applied
at boot and whenever the power cable moves. To see what it is doing you run
tlp-stat as root and read a wall of text.
The one GUI that exists edits settings, not state. TLPUI is a capable editor for TLP's ~200 configuration options. It does not tell you your current draw, which profile is active, or how long the battery will last.
Those are the questions people actually ask. How many watts am I burning? Will this last the flight? Why is the fan on while I am doing nothing? TLP Panel answers them on one screen, and puts the handful of settings worth changing next to the answers.
And it tells you when a knob is fake. Some power settings exist in /sys,
accept a value, store it, and change nothing — the hardware never wired them
up. That is worse than not offering them. This app checks, and says so.
Add the repository once, and updates arrive with the rest of your system:
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/apt/keyrings/tlp-panel.asc \
https://timemrah.github.io/tlp-panel/apt/tlp-panel.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/tlp-panel.asc] https://timemrah.github.io/tlp-panel/apt stable main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tlp-panel.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp-panelDependencies come with it. If TLP is not installed yet, apt pulls it in.
Prefer a single file? Download the .deb from
Releases and run
sudo apt install ./tlp-panel_*_all.deb — but then each update is another
download.
yay -S tlp-panelsudo apt install tlp python3-gi gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-adw-1 polkitd
git clone https://github.com/timemrah/tlp-panel.git
cd tlp-panel
sudo make installLaunch TLP Panel from your application grid, or run tlp-panel.
| Command | |
|---|---|
make run |
try it without installing |
sudo make uninstall |
remove a source install |
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b |
build the .deb yourself |
| Power draw | Watts, live, straight from the battery. While charging it reports charge power and says so — the two are not the same number. |
| Battery | Charge, health as current capacity against design capacity, and cycle count. |
| Estimated runtime | How long the charge will last: right now, at a full pack, and at your charge limit. Plugged in, it counts up to those instead. |
Every control writes to /etc/tlp.d/90-tlp-panel.conf and applies at once, so
settings survive a reboot.
| System mode | Automatic follows the cable. Battery saving and Full performance pin one profile — and apply the three settings below as a preset. |
| Charge limit | Stop charging at a chosen percentage, written to the battery firmware. Plus a one-off charge to 100% for the day before a trip. |
| CPU speed limit | How fast the processor may run, in the steps it actually offers. Automatic caps it on battery and lifts the cap on AC; the slider overrides the source in use. |
| Wi-Fi power saving | Let the radio sleep on battery only, always, or never. |
| Sleep idle devices | Whether idle PCI devices may power down. Your per-device exemptions are left alone. |
| Adaptive backlight | AMD panel power saving, separately for AC and battery. |
The interface follows your locale, and the main menu can pin it to English or
Türkçe instead. That choice lives in ~/.config/tlp-panel/language and changes
nothing about your power settings.
TLP reads its drop-in directory before /etc/tlp.conf, so a key set in that
file — by hand, or by another editor such as TLPUI — wins over the panel. When
that happens the panel says so instead of letting a control snap back to a
value you did not choose, and offers to comment those lines out. It will not do
that on its own: /etc/tlp.conf belongs to the tlp package, and once it
differs from the packaged copy, upgrading tlp asks you what to do with it.
Controls appear only when they can do something:
- Adaptive backlight runs on the display microcontroller. On several AMD APUs that firmware is never loaded, so the kernel accepts a level, stores it, and nothing happens. TLP Panel detects this and leaves the sliders greyed out.
- Charge limits appear only when the battery exposes thresholds.
- The CPU speed limit offers the frequencies the scaling driver reports. Drivers that publish a list of P-states give exactly those; drivers that take any value in a range get an evenly spaced set. A processor with a single frequency has nothing to choose, so the slider stays away.
- Wi-Fi and device sleep appear only when there is something to control.
The window runs as your user, never as root. Everything on screen comes from files any user can read:
| Value | Source |
|---|---|
| Draw, charge, health, cycles, thresholds | /sys/class/power_supply/BAT* |
| Mains state | /sys/class/power_supply/*/online |
| Active and forced profile | /run/tlp/last_pwr, /run/tlp/manual_mode |
| Effective TLP settings | /run/tlp/run.conf |
Batteries reporting charge in µAh instead of energy in µWh are converted using
the reported voltage, so machines without power_now still show watts.
Changes go through pkexec to /usr/libexec/tlp-panel-helper, a shell script
that takes a fixed set of verbs with validated arguments and writes only
allowlisted keys. It never passes an argument to a shell. Both polkit actions
are auth_admin_keep, so a run of adjustments asks once.
The interface follows your locale. English is the source language; Turkish
ships with it. A new language is one dictionary in src/tlppanel/i18n.py —
there are no catalogues to compile.
make check fails when a translatable string has no entry, so a language
cannot quietly rot.
GPL-3.0-or-later.
TLP is a separate project by Thomas Koch, licensed GPL-2.0+; this panel only calls its command-line interface.