Fedora 41 To Replace Power-Profiles-Daemon With "Tuned"

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins.

UPower's power-profiles-daemon is a D-Bus daemon for handling power profiles on Linux such as between balanced / power-saver / performance modes. Power-profiles-daemon is commonly found on desktop Linux distributions while moving forward Fedora is planning to switch over to Tuned, which is an in-house alternative developed by Red Hat.

Tuned is a profile delivery mechanism for Linux from Red Hat's performance team. With Tuned-PPD, it can serve as a drop-in replacement to power-profiles-daemon without any desktop integration changes needed. Tuned does offer more advanced customizability than power-profiles-daemon for power users as well as more profiles for different use-cases.

The change proposal for replacing power-profiles-daemon with Tuned makes the case of:

"Tuned and power-profiles-daemon provide a similar function to set and tune the power status of a system. Both of them have similar features, if they can be integrated into one, it allows the Fedora user to have more options for power settings of their system and benefits the users. In this proposal, we set up tuned to the default power profile management daemon for the GNOME in Fedora Workstation and the KDE Plasma Spin. Tuned already provides power profiles for different use cases. Recently, tuned released the translation API layer called tuned-ppd which can translate the power-profiles-daemon API to tuned. The applications that use power-profiles-daemon API can access tuned without modifying the code. For now, the Fedora user can immediately switch to tuned by installing the tuned-ppd package without impacting the user experience. Therefore, tuned can be the default power profile management daemon for Fedora.

This work would replace power-profiles-daemon with tuned. Since tuned already provides a wide range of power profiles for different purposes, this allows the user to have more options for configuring the system power profile. Tuned provides many kinds of advanced and basic profiles for different purposes. Power-profiles-daemon provides the basic power profiles and the profiles can be set to the system through platform_profiles, Intel p-state and AMD p-state. That is simple and clever. However, if the users want to ask for an advanced profile, they need to install another power utility, such as tuned to fine-tune their system. With tuned as the default power profile management daemon, users have a wider range of profiles to fine-tune the system."

This change for Tuned by default was accepted at this week's FESCo meeting for Fedora 41. The power-profiles-daemon package will remain available in Fedora Linux for those wanting to use it rather than Tuned.

Those wanting to spin Tuned from source on their own can find it via redhat-performance/tuned on GitHub. It's with the recent Tuned 2.23 release earlier this month where it's now hit parity to power-profiles-daemon capabilities.