Wi-fi Power Saver Mode in Debian

January 31, 2026

I’m using Xfce Debian. On other day, I was using Debian at lower battery % (< 10%). Then I started to face an issue with wifi. It work sometime but most of the time, I won’t. The issue was Debian (or Xfce?) aggressively enable the power saving options when the laptop is at low battery

Run the following command to get the list of devices.

sudo iw dev

This returns a list of devices. Get the interface name from the output e.g. wlp2s0 or similar for wifi and check if power saver is on or off.

sudo iw dev wlp2s0 get power_save

You should see a result like - Power save: on. Turn off by running following command.

sudo iw dev wlp2s0 set power_save off

Finally, to permanently turn-off the power saver mode, adjust the following config at /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf location.

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 2

Other possible values are (ref):

NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DEFAULT (0): use the default value
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_IGNORE (1): don't touch existing setting
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DISABLE (2): disable powersave
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_ENABLE (3): enable powersave

P.S. If file doesn't exists, create one.

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