Using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS? You will soon see a short notice when tweaking power management features, as the distro moves to comply with recent EU ‘ecodesign’ regulations.

The changes are part of an update to the GNOME Control Center package on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS—which you may know better by its user-facing label of Settings. It adds an info bar to the Power panel when turning auto-suspend off that reads:

“Disabling automatic suspend will result in higher power consumption. It is recommended to keep automatic suspend enabled”.

This is the exact same text shown to users of Ubuntu 25.04 with GNOME 48, which was the first version of the desktop environment to introduce the disclaimers.

Ubuntu has back-ported the changes as a result of EU directive 2023/826, which states: “…users shall be warned about the increased energy consumption of the action […] on the displays integrated in or connected to the equipment.“

If you never disable automatic suspend you won’t ever see these warnings

These “ecodesign requirements” loop in all kinds of ‘household and office electrical and electronic equipment’, including laptops.

OEMs sell laptops with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS preinstalled which is the warnings are being added (and why the patches were tracked as a bug in Canonical’s OEM Priority Project).

The patches themselves are not intrusive. If you never disable automatic suspend (or visit the Power panel) you won’t ever see a warning.

They’re simply there to reminder users that turning off energy-saving features will use more energy (like, duh).

Although back-ported from Ubuntu 25.04 with GNOME 48, Ubuntu’s developers needed to tweak the warnings to work with GNOME 46’s single-page Power panel (GNOME 48 splits its Power settings across two pages).

Translation updates will follow, so if you run Ubuntu 24.04 in a non-English language you may see the energy disclaimer in English for a short while.

Why is this warning needed?

‘Not letting your laptop suspend will require more energy’ might sound like common sense, but common sense is a commodity in short supply these days .

But on a serious note, users may inadvertently auto-suspend unaware that the the amount of energy their device will use will go up.

It’s a heads-up with merit: for users: save money by lowering energy usage; and for the EU, help reduce the CO2 emissions to meet its environmental goals.