I’m running 6.1.3 on Wayland, and whenever I boot up, the power management widget complains that an instance of power-profiles-daemon could not be detected. In this state it doesn’t show any battery percentage, and you naturally can’t get/set the CPU power profile. power-profiles-daemon.service is running, however. Restarting plasma-plasmashell.service makes the widget finally detect it, and after that it works as expected.
power-profiles-daemon is version 0.21-1. plasma-desktop and other plasma packages are version 6.1.3-1.
The Unit section of /usr/lib/systemd/system/power-profiles-daemon.service looks like this;
[Unit]
Description=Power Profiles daemon
Conflicts=tuned.service tlp.service auto-cpufreq.service system76-power.service
Before=multi-user.target display-manager.target
Before=display-manager.target ensures it is started before the graphical environment starts, and so Plasma should see it, especially if you take into account the additional time it takes for me to log in via sddm. It’s unlikely not to be ready, but I don’t know how to prove it.
systemd user units can’t refer to system units by design, so it is not possible to add an extra After=power-profiles-daemon.service to /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-plasmashell.service.
The only thing in the user journal I can find that is present in the first run (where the widget doesn’t work) and not in subsequent runs (where it works) are these two;
jul 20 12:10:56 x1 plasmashell[1289]: error getting max screen brightness via dbus: QDBusError("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown", "The name is not activatable")
jul 20 12:10:56 x1 plasmashell[1289]: error getting max keyboard brightness via dbus QDBusError("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown", "The name is not activatable")
I don’t remember if screen and keyboard brightness controls are also unavailable, and not just CPU and battery controls. I can reboot and verify later if it seems relevant.
What could cause something like this?