Looking for an easy way to get a top-level overview of your laptop’s battery health on Ubuntu? If so, check out Battery Status by Spanish blog Atareao.
They’ve created a GNOME extension that reminds me a lot of the fancy menu bar apps available for macOS. Y’know, the ones that convey laptop battery health via a well designed panel applet replete with colourful graphs and reams of info.
Battery Status provides something similar for the Ubuntu desktop (though it works wherever GNOME Shell does). While it’s not quite as detailed as, say, something like Coconut Battery its still a solid start (especially keeping in mind that it’s a GNOME extension too and not a full-blown desktop app).
The applet shows current battery charge as both percentage and milliamp hours. Now, the ring charts in this section are not labelled so I assume the left one is current current charge, but the second one? Not a clue.
A second section relays battery health including current max charge capacity and original max charge capacity, plus live voltage details and original voltage details. These stats are a bit over my head but I imagine they’ll be useful to many.
Configuration wiser you can change the colour of the ring graphs, specify a power path manually, and adjust the ‘check’ interval for fetching status info.
While I don’t think Battery Status is an applet I’ll keep enabled all the time, I can see myself using this more as my laptop’s battery health starts to slope downwards. It’s also a great utility to quickly toggle on/off during troubleshooting if issues arise so you can rule out a failing battery.
I’d love to see the applet get even geekier by showing even more information (well, as much that it can glean). After all, if someone is going out of their way to install a battery health tool chances are they’re okay with being told as much as possible. Add in cycle count, battery age, maybe power usage in watts and possibly temperature too — go to town with it.
Battery Status is available to install from the GNOME extensions website but it currently only support GNOME 3.38 and GNOME 40. Source code is on GitHub, which is the ideal place to get involved in its development, report issues, and so on.