The summary of this bug report says "'Show Percentage Remaining' is more
useful than 'Show Time Remaining'". As far as I can tell, though, this
bug report does not contain any evidence for that, and doesn't even
contain any evidence that showing the percentage is useful at all. For
that reason, I'm marking it Incomplete.
Without that evidence, I believe that battery percentage -- while easy
for a battery to report, and for an OS to display -- is pretty much
useless to humans. For example, on the 2008 MacBook running Ubuntu that
I'm using right now, 98% means about 2 hours remaining. On my 2011
MacBook running Mac OS X, 98% means about 10 hours remaining. That's a
fivefold difference in how long I can use the computer, represented by
exactly the same percentage value.
It may be true that on some machines, the time estimate changes too much
and/or too often to be useful either. If so, then as Vish and Ted have
suggested, that is a fixable bug. (Sample from more minutes, and/or give
less emphasis to recent changes in the charge level, and/or cater for
old batteries by reversing the charge curve from the previous cycle.)
Making the time estimate less prominent would not fix that bug. And
showing the percentage would not improve the situation at all -- because
in the absence of a time estimate, your brain would be estimating the
time based on the rate of percentage decline, and that rate would be
fluctuating exactly as much.
Percentage might be interesting to someone troubleshooting a battery
problem, or investigating whether a battery is worn out. So it is useful
to show it in the Power Statistics window, where it already is. I would
be happy to help anyone who would like to make that window more
understandable.
** Changed in: ayatana-design
Status: New => Incomplete
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/811777
Title:
"Show Percentage Remaining" is more useful than "Show Time Remaining"
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