hello there. i want to have a battery level meter on my desktop to make it easier to see the charge level. i’ve tried to find an app or widget that would give me that, just like i have on my phone. i know i have the little thing in the upper right corner of the screen but that can be hard to see, especially if i’m really tired or in brighter light. i’m using Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS on an hp pavilon g7 16gb ram 1tb ssd i7-2620m processor. i’ve tried asking about this on ask ubuntu about a week ago, i think, now and haven’t received an answer from anyone there. i tried to google for and answer but my google fu isn’t very good. any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks.
Desktop PCs don’t have a battery, if you have an HP Pavilion you don’t have a desktop but a laptop/notebook.
In Settings>Power you may set ‘show battery percentage’ to have a more visible info in upper right corner.
You may also pin the ‘Power Statistics’ app to the dock.
In any case Ubuntu will give a notify if the battery is to low.
yes i have a laptop. desktops still have a battery for the cmos. i want something that i can simply look at on the desktop, not the system tray or dock, to see the battery level. like i said, when i’m tired or in bright light the system tray might be too hard to see properly. on my phone i have an app that i can look at that i can see what level my battery is at, want the same for my computer desktop, you know close/minimize all windows and see it right there no problem. do you know of an app or a widget that can help me?
It is rather tedious to install since it is not packaged in the archive or as a snap, also … it takes over your wallpaper, but there is:
You want know the CMOS battery level?
no not cmos battery level, the laptops battery level.
not exactly what i need. but thanx. i’ll look at it anyways.
You might want to look at configuring a “conky” setup.
The following article can guide you,
The resulting “conky” is this:
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Note that conky is in the archive, you do not need to install any zip files like that article suggests, just an apt install conky-all will install it for you …
I’d have pointed to conky or gkrellm above, but neither of them will work with wayland and with both of KDE and GNOME dropping X11 support with the next release they will simply stop working in the default install (they will likely keep working on flavors that decide to keep X11 available indeed)
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i did consider conky but i don’t know it anyways. and since it doesn’t work with wayland without a bunch of work that may or may not work i won’t try it. any other suggestions?
According to the GitHub site, conky does support Wayland, but I haven’t tried it myself, since I’m on 22.04.5.
Not entirely true.
The web page actually says “It can also run on Wayland (with caveats)”
I tried it on Wayland and was unable to get it to work.
Well, as they say, “the devil is in the details” or, in this case, in the caveats! I don’t think they would claim it worked, if it didn’t. It’s a matter of trust and reputation for them.
anyone else have any ideas, please?
isn’t this enough?
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as i said, when i’m tired or in bright light, i can’t see/read that. i want something on the desktop that is bigger and easier to see without taking up more system tray or dock space. dock space is for pinning apps to or active/running windows
Since other offerings appear to fall short of what you want, you might want to look at what is discussed in this article:
- Check Battery Status on Ubuntu Using This GNOME Extension [OMG Ubuntu]
- Corresponding GNOME “Shell Extension” page
- Corresponding GitHub “Code Repository”
The extension looks like this:
The visuals suggest some interesting features. Specifically, Original Max vs Current Max.
Here’s a script I wrote to use notify-send to let me know the battery level at regular intervals. I’m not satisfied with it yet and intend to make some improvements, but it works.
https://gitlab.com/mdebusk/dotfiles/-/blob/main/bin/battery-monitor
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That link doesn’t work … directly. You need to go to
then click on “battery-monitor”.
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Thanks for the correction. I had no idea GitLab did that.