PopOS 24/COSMIC: make the power button suspend and don't sleep when the lid closes

Upgraded PoOS recently and lost some features I iused to have…I wanted my laptop to suspend when I press the power button, and turn the screen off when I close the lid. COSMIC’s settings don’t allow me to set these any more!

I sent Claude looking in the source to see how big a patch it would be, but it turned out not to be as complex as all that…

Claude wrote this part. It sounds Claudy but I do not have time to make it sound like me, and I didn’t do it anyway!

Fix 1: power button suspends

PowerOff is one of the system_actions, a map from action name to command. COSMIC reads the shipped map from /usr/share/cosmic/ and then overlays your own, key by key, from ~/.config/cosmic/. The compositor watches that file, so changes apply without logging out.

Create the file ~/.config/cosmic/com.system76.CosmicSettings.Shortcuts/v1/system_actions containing:

{
    PowerOff: "systemctl suspend",
}

Fix 2: lid does nothing

This part is plain systemd. Drop in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/90-ignore-lid.conf:

[Login]
HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore

sudo install -D -m644 90-ignore-lid.conf /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/90-ignore-lid.conf

Make logind re-read its config (a reboot also works):

sudo systemctl kill -s HUP systemd-logind

Check it took:

busctl get-property org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 org.freedesktop.login1.Manager HandleLidSwitch

That should print s "ignore".

Summary

Both are ordinary config files, so they should survive COSMIC updates.