Comment #2 on issue 516 by allber...@gmail.com: XMonad and xmobar wake up too often and are consuming more battery power http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=516 (I hope this doesn't try to "fix" my formatting...) You can work around this by building xmonad manually, but each of the possibilities has flaws: ghc -threaded --make -i -ilib -fforce-recomp xmonad.hs -o xmonad-$(uname -m)-$(uname | tr A-Z a-z) this will work but may cause problems with some extensions ghc -rtsopts -with-rtsopts=-V0 --make -i -ilib -fforce-recomp xmonad.hs -o xmonad-$(uname -m)-$(uname | tr A-Z a-z) this may still interrupt too often but not as often as with the buggy runtime If you don't have an xmonad.hs yet, a bare minimal one you can use with this is import XMonad main = xmonad defaultConfig