Notebook does not power off when battery is critically low

Credits to @A.B. and @Serg for collaboration on solving this issue!
Recently we found the root cause for the problem and the solution:

  • In Ubuntu 14.04 default gsettings for critical-battery-action are set to 'suspend'.
  • In Ubuntu 15.04 default gsettings for critical-battery-action are set to 'shutdown'.
  • In Ubuntu 15.10 default gsettings for critical-battery-action are set to 'suspend'.

So the default setting has to be 'suspend'. You can change that by executing in terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power critical-battery-action suspend  

Now the When power is critically low section in the system settings GUI has no entry any more:

This seems to be a bug in gsettings, as the 'suspend' setting leads to the 'shutdown' action.
As a contribution to help getting this curiosity fixed I filed a bug report at launchpad.net:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/d-conf/+bug/1492174

Update : Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.