It's great that the indicator applet tells me I have 2 hours and 12 minutes of battery left, or that it will be charged in 1 hour 8 minutes, but I might well change my pattern of usage during that time and am frankly not confused by percentages.

How do I make the applet show a percentage charged or discharged instead?

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Which version are using? I'm using lucid, and it's the exact opposite for me. It only show the percentage, and not the time remaining, though I'd like to see both. – Bruce Connor Sep 2 '10 at 11:56
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Matthew Paul Thomas, an interface designer for Canonical's Ubuntu team, in his blog comments this April wrote "I think the only point in showing a percentage charge is so that a human can get an idea of how much time is left. But we have computers to do those sort of calculations now. If a battery’s estimated time remaining is wrong, its percentage will be even less informative."

There is also a comment on the Ubuntu wiki that says "This coloring is deliberately time-based, not percentage-based; how much time you have left is more important than how long the battery can theoretically last."

Mockup of new battery indicator menus

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No, the point in showing a percentage is to avoid totally depleting your battery (bad: lifehacker.com/5789794/…) while running it at 70-30% (lifehacker.com/5875162/…) – Amanda Jan 23 at 2:11
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You can install the Battery-Stats applet, which will replace the Power-Managers's applet with more information and some power-management options as a bonus.

sudo apt-get install battery-stats
battery-stats-collector

Then see /var/log/battery-stats for sample information.

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The percentage was intentionally removed by the power house that is the Canonical design team. See the comments by MPT here: http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/battery/

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I don't think the indicator shows that information yet.

You can click on the menu entry which says "X hours YY minutes left to (dis)charge" and it will open the battery profile dialog. That one has percentages under "Laptop Battery -> Details (scroll to bottom)"

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