Hibernation & battery-life optimization on Framework 13 (AMD) running NixOS

12 May, 2026

I was struggling somewhat with battery life when idle on my Framework 13 (AMD AI-300) running NixOS. Honestly the battery life wasn’t that bad, but it was very annoying that my laptop would randomly be dead after not using it for two days.

I didn’t find a clear guide for improving the battery life on NixOS, and trying to turn on things like deep-sleep:

boot.kernelParams = [ "mem_sleep_default=deep" ];

don’t work and actually break suspend. Furthermore, from AMD systems using power-profiles-daemon is recommended, which doesn’t have much tweaking available, and thus no room for improvement.

All that can be done to improve is to enable hibernation.

I added this to my system config:

    { config, lib, pkgs, inputs, ... }: {
    
      ...
    
      # Swap file setup
      boot.initrd.systemd.enable = true;
      swapDevices = [{
        device = "/var/lib/swapfile";
        size = 1024 * 16;
      }];
    
      ...
    
      systemd.sleep.extraConfig = ''
        HibernateDelaySec=1h
        SuspendState=mem
      '';
    
    }

Note here the HibernateDelaySec as this is the time-delay to start hibernation. The default value for this is 2h, and hibernation will kick in when either this time has past, or if battery drops to 5% or lower (docs).

We can now test if hibernation is working properly by running:

    systemctl hibernate

Then to actually start using it automatically, I simply change out systemctl suspend with systemctl suspend-then-hibernate in my Hyprland keybinds:

    # === Lock screen config ===
    $screenLockCmd = noctalia-shell ipc call lockScreen lock
    $suspendCmd = systemctl suspend-then-hibernate
    $lockAndSuspendCmd = $screenLockCmd && $suspendCmd
    
    bind = $mainMod, Z, exec, $lockAndSuspendCmd

And that’s it! I now can not use my laptop for a day or two, and still have enough charge to do whatever I needed.

#framework #nix