The UPower abstraction layer used for power management on Linux systems, especially laptops and desktops, is out with an important fix today to avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery "fast" charging mode on some laptops that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster.

Two months ago a bug report came in about UPower changing the default charge type to "Fast" when disabling the laptop battery charging threshold feature. Typically it would be "standard" as the default and typically what a user would expect unless they explicitly opt for the "fast" charging mode. Fast charging is known to degrade the battery over time due to excess heat generated causing thermal stress leading to damaged battery cells over time and degraded performance.

Thanks to open-source developer Armin Wolf, there is now a fix that was merged to prefer "standard" over "fast" charging for UPower's device battery handling. Again, the sub-optimal behavior came about if disabling the battery charging threshold feature and not realizing it changed to "fast" charging in the process.

That change is the most prominent item of yesterday's UPower 1.91.3 release along with a handful of other bug fixes.