ROG Flow Z13 — Power Management

What’s new → Armory Crate button · gamescope in-game overlay · tray follows plug/unplug (bugfix) · Tweaks undervolt · silicon lottery · charge cap that survives reboot · ~99% less idle work.

Power, lighting, and thermals for the 2025 ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (GZ302) — one service, no Armory Crate, no Windows. Built on z13ctl. Replaces the z13gui overlay drawer. Works on Omarchy, Hyprland, KDE Plasma, and anything with a system tray.

Features

Power Plug in → Performance. Unplug → Balanced. Low battery → Quiet. Four recipes plus Custom (5–93 W slider). Quiet is a real 20 W lock. Lock a manual pick across plug/unplug. Low battery still forces Quiet, then restores it. Handheld tablet (keyboard off or tablet hinge, no TV) → Quiet. Keyboard-off to a TV keeps high power. Charge limit 40–100%, re-applied at login. One-shot charge to 100% for this plug-in only.

Control Omarchy: lives in the battery slot — live watts, temp, profile pills, Automatic, Lock. Everywhere else: a tinted tray bolt. Left-click cycles; right-click opens the menu. The Armory Crate side button opens settings on the desktop. Nested gamescope (Steam, Lutris, Heroic) gets an in-game profile picker. CLI: z13-power custom · performance · balanced · silent · lowpower. max is custom 93.

Tuning Keyboard and lightbar: effect, colors, speed, brightness — restored at login. 8-point fan curve, or reset to firmware auto. Curve Optimizer undervolt, 0 to −40 mV, with a silicon-lottery suggestion. Panel overdrive, boot sound, live APU temp / fan / TDP.

Desktop No KDE Run Script hooks. No PowerDevil profile wars. No z13ctl autoswitch. Follows the live Omarchy theme when one is present. Diagnose reports hardware, permissions, daemon, and modules — with the fix. Notifications on every switch, including changes from the overlay or the CLI.

Profiles

Mode	When	TDP (W)	Undervolt
performance	AC	75 / 75 / 93 / 93	reset
balanced	Battery	52 / 71 / 70	reset
silent	Low battery	20 / 20 / 20	−20 mV
custom	manual	5–93 slider	reset
lowpower	manual	5	−25 mV

z13-power status prints the live state. z13-power settings opens the window (RGB, fan, battery, Tweaks, telemetry).

Tray, settings, and overlay — in detail

z13-power-service (system tray):

• Tray icon + menu — left-click cycles profiles, right-click opens the menu; five modes + Automatic, current one marked. ROG-style icon tinted by the active profile (colours follow the Omarchy theme when one is present). On SNI trays (Omarchy, waybar, …) the service leaves IconName empty so the host renders that pixmap instead of a theme icon. The Qt menu and settings window read ~/.local/state/omarchy/current/theme and restyle themselves; the SNI item re-registers when the bar restarts so the icon does not vanish. On Omarchy the tray host can open a panel-style flyout (hero, stats, profile pills) from contrib/omarchy/z13.power/Z13PowerPanel.qml.
• Automatic (default) — applies on_ac / on_battery / on_low_battery from config on login and power changes
• Manual picks apply immediately; unless Lock profile is checked, they clear on the next plug/unplug and return to Automatic
• Lock profile — a manual pick survives power changes (low battery still forces the safety profile, then restores your locked pick)
• Notifications — popup on every switch, and when a profile is changed from outside the service (overlay, terminal, Armory Crate button)
• Diagnose… — runs z13-power diagnose (hardware, permissions, daemon, modules) and shows the report with fixes; also checked at service startup (only notifies if something is wrong)
• Armory Crate button — the side button that did nothing on Linux (it opened Armory Crate on Windows) now toggles UI: press to open, press again to close. On the desktop that is full settings, stuck above a fullscreen game. Inside nested gamescope (Steam, Lutris, Heroic, gamescope --) it is a clickable in-game profile picker (Max / Perf / Mid / Quiet / Low) — Hyprland, Plasma Wayland, and X11. Uses z13ctl's gui-toggle event. The full settings window is never opened on gamescope's Xwayland (that SIGSEGV'd).

z13-power-settings (settings window, replaces the z13gui drawer). On Omarchy it follows the live theme — same hero / section-header / pill language as the tray flyout — instead of a stock Qt tab dialog:

• Lighting — keyboard + lightbar zones, effect (static / breathe / cycle / rainbow / strobe / off), two colors (presets or an HSL picker), speed, brightness. Selections persist in lighting.conf and are re-applied at login.
• Fan curve — fetch the live 8-point curve, edit temp/speed pairs, apply or reset to firmware auto (75 W PL1 safety rules enforced).
• Battery — charge limit slider (40–100%). Saved in battery.conf and re-applied at login (the ACPI cap does not survive reboot).
• Tweaks — panel overdrive, boot sound, and a CPU undervolt slider (Curve Optimizer, 0 to -40 mV). Saved in tweaks.conf and re-applied at login and after every profile switch. A silicon-lottery score (50–99) sits next to it with a suggested starting undervolt; best and weakest cores use the same scale. Derived from AMD preferred-core rankings, not ASUS BIOS SP.
• Profiles — which mode runs on AC / battery / low battery and the low-battery threshold, written back to service.conf; "Open config file…" exposes the raw file for per-mode TDP / fan curve / undervolt tuning.
• Telemetry — live APU temperature, fan RPM, profile, TDP, power source.

Opened from the tray menu (Settings…) or with z13-power settings (the Meta+B panel button). The low-battery tier is the reason this project exists — z13ctl's own autoswitch only supports AC/battery.

Requirements

• 2025 ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (GZ302) — these are laptop-specific values
• Arch Linux / CachyOS (KDE Plasma 6, Hyprland, etc.)
• AUR: z13ctl-bin (required)
• python-pyqt6, python-pyudev, libnotify (required — tray service + notifications)
• python-dbus-next (required — non-KDE Wayland desktops serve the tray menu via an SNI/dbusmenu item; KDE/X11 don't use it)
• KDE Plasma is not required — the tray service is plain Qt and works on any desktop. See Desktop environments below.
• ryzen_smu-dkms-git (amkillam fork) — required for the Tweaks undervolt slider. Paru installs it as a dependency of z13-power-git. It is a DKMS kernel module (not baked into this repo): it must rebuild against your running kernel, so install the matching -headers package (e.g. linux-cachyos-bore-headers). Without it, the slider still saves and reapplies once the module is loaded.
• AUR conflicts: if you already run a z13ctl variant (e.g. z13ctl-plus-bin), pacman will offer to swap it for z13ctl-bin — that's expected and safe. z13gui-bin is no longer needed: remove it with paru -Rns z13gui-bin.

Install

Recommended — packaged (scripts land in /usr/bin):

First add Fifthdread's package repo to paru — one command (adds + syncs):

curl -fsSL https://5d.fyi/addrepo | bash

Prefer not to run a script? Add the repo by hand, then sync:

mkdir -p ~/.config/paru && printf '[fifthdread]\nUrl = https://forgejo.fifthdread.com/Fifthdread/pkgbuilds.git\nSkipReview\n' >> ~/.config/paru/paru.conf
paru -Sy --pkgbuilds

The sync step is required — without it paru -S won't know about z13-power-git. Then install (this is the packaged Arch path; do not switch to the GitHub marketplace pin unless you want /usr digest checks):

paru -S z13-power-git

Dependencies are pulled automatically by paru (z13ctl-bin, python-pyqt6, python-pyudev, libnotify), and the install hook enables + starts the tray service for you — no extra commands. Installed as root (no paru)? It auto-starts at your next login via a user preset.

Or from source:

git clone ssh://git@forgejo.fifthdread.com:223/Fifthdread/rog-z13-power-management.git
cd rog-z13-power-management
./install.sh

Either path:

1. Checks dependencies (z13ctl, ryzen_smu, users group)
2. Installs z13-power + z13-power-service (to /usr/bin or ~/.local/bin)
3. Runs sudo z13ctl setup (udev rules + sysfs permission service) if needed
4. Enables the z13ctl daemon + socket and the z13-power-service tray app
5. Deploys the PowerDevil display settings (backing up yours)

Then log out and back in (for group changes), and verify:

z13-power diagnose
z13-power status

z13-power diagnose checks hardware, permissions, the daemon, and modules, and tells you exactly what to fix if anything's wrong (on a fresh machine that's usually: sudo z13ctl setup, then re-login for the users group).

Want the Tweaks undervolt slider live on this kernel?

z13-power setup-undervolt

That installs the matching -headers package plus ryzen_smu-dkms-git (amkillam, rebuilds via DKMS — nothing prebuilt in this repo).

A tray icon should appear — click it to switch profiles manually.

Desktop environments

The service, settings window, and CLI are plain Qt/Python + z13ctl — no KDE APIs, no PowerDevil hooks, no autoswitch. Everything runs on any desktop:

• KDE Plasma — works out of the box. The installer also deploys a display/DPMS-only powerdevilrc (optional; z13-power-config does the same for packaged installs). Don't set KDE's own per-state power profiles — see Caveats.

• Hyprland / Omarchy — works out of the box too; Omarchy's bar already provides an SNI system tray and a notification daemon, so both the tray icon and notify-send popups appear with no extra software. On non-KDE Wayland desktops the service registers its own StatusNotifierItem + dbusmenu, so the tray menu (right-click) is rendered by the bar itself instead of Qt (Qt's tray backend can't pop a menu on Wayland). The SNI IconName is left empty on purpose: hosts prefer a theme name over IconPixmap, so advertising preferences-system-power made the tray show a fixed yellow power glyph instead of the profile-tinted bolt. If the SNI item ever fails to register, the service automatically falls back to the classic Qt tray icon (and notifies you) rather than losing the icon. Two things to check:

  • the service auto-starts at login — it hooks graphical-session.target (systemctl --user is-active graphical-session.target; Hyprland setups must import it via systemctl --user import-environment + start the target, which Omarchy does);
  • z13-power-config is a no-op outside KDE (display/DPMS is hypridle's job there). Other Wayland compositors need an SNI-capable tray (waybar, anyrun, …) and a notification daemon (swaync, mako, dunst, …) for the same features.

  Omarchy specifically: install.sh runs z13-power-omarchy-setup, which puts z13.power in the battery slot (Max / Perf / Mid / Quiet / Low, Automatic, Lock) and z13.battery for low-battery warnings. Stock omarchy.power is disabled, not edited. The SNI bolt goes Passive while that widget is on the bar. omarchy update does not remove the user plugins; omarchy refresh shell can restore the stock slot — re-run z13-power-omarchy-setup. The service still writes status.json / command.json so the panel never races z13ctl.

Configuration

~/.config/z13-power/service.conf (created on first run with full inline documentation; the settings window's Profiles tab edits it, and its "Open config file…" button opens the raw file). The [service] section maps power states to modes; each [modes.<name>] section defines exactly what z13ctl commands run for that profile:

[service]
low_battery = 15
on_ac = performance
on_battery = balanced
on_low_battery = silent

[modes.performance]
profile = performance
tdp = 75 93 93        # PL1 PL2 PL3 watts (one number = all equal)
tdp_force = false     # allow PL1 > 75 (hardware max 93)
fancurve = reset      # reset | "40:30%,50:40%,..." (8-point curve)
undervolt = reset     # reset | -1..-40 (Curve Optimizer mV)

Values are validated (bad ones fall back to defaults) and reloaded automatically every ~30s — no service restart needed.

Caveats

• Undervolt is silicon lottery. Quiet (-20 mV) and Low (-25 mV) were stable on one GZ302. If yours crashes under load, ease off: pull the Tweaks slider toward 0, or change undervolt= in those modes (scripts/z13-power / service.conf) to something milder or reset.
• Don't use z13ctl's built-in autoswitch. z13ctl autoswitch and the tray service would both fire on power changes and race each other. Leave autoswitch off: z13ctl autoswitch --clear
• Don't set per-state power profiles in your desktop's own power manager. On KDE that's System Settings → Power Management → "Performance". On Omarchy, z13-power-omarchy-setup replaces the bar's Power slot with z13.power so that flyout talks to us instead of powerprofiles-set. Keep the service as the single profile switcher.
• The custom / lowpower modes are manual (tray menu or terminal) — they are not wired into any power state.
• Requires the z13ctl daemon running for TDP/fancurve/undervolt persistence. Check with systemctl --user status z13ctl.

Project layout

├── CHANGELOG.md            # what's new — features, compatibility, numbers
├── install.sh              # from-source installer (deps, units, config deploy)
├── scripts/
│   ├── z13-power           # the mode CLI: 6 modes + settings + setup-undervolt
│   └── z13-power-omarchy-setup  # Omarchy: z13.power in the battery slot
├── service/
│   ├── z13-power-service   # tray icon + power profile watcher (PyQt6)
│   ├── z13-power-settings  # settings window: RGB, fan curve, battery, Tweaks
│   ├── z13_power_common.py # shared paths, z13ctl, battery.conf / charge cap
│   ├── z13_power_io.py     # bounded conf I/O and helper processes
│   └── z13-power-service.service   # systemd user unit
├── contrib/
│   ├── omarchy/            # z13.power + z13.battery user plugins
│   ├── ryzen-smu/          # udev + modules-load for Curve Optimizer
│   └── z13-power-config    # packaged helper: deploys KDE Plasma display settings
├── kde/
│   └── powerdevilrc        # display/DPMS-only PowerDevil template (KDE only)
├── LICENSE                 # GPL-3.0-or-later
└── CONTEXT.md              # agent knowledge (local, not for the Forgejo page)

Credits

• z13ctl — system control for the Z13
• This project replaces the z13gui overlay drawer: profiles, RGB lighting, fan curves, battery limit, panel overdrive, boot sound, telemetry — all in the system tray + settings window.