Wrong battery calculation on GNOME

[deleted]

Hi,
I'm currently using Solus GNOME Edition on a MacBook Pro 9,2 and I'm facing issues concerning my battery life. No matter how long I charge it up, it never goes over 75%. I also tried the command "acpi" and got 99% as battery status when GNOME showed me only 75%. I don't know if this helps, but when I still used Mac OS the battery calculation worked perfectly so I don't think that it's a hardware problem. Any help would be appreciated.

JoshStrobl

I also tried the command "acpi" and got 99% as battery status when GNOME showed me only 75%

That's because it's either doing one of two things:

Calculating it based on available capacity, which isn't necessary what your battery was designed for. You can see this by doing upower -e to list the interfaces and typing out the full object path with upower's show info, for example:

[~] upower -e                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
/org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/line_power_AC0
/org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
/org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/DisplayDevice
[~] upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
  native-path:          BAT0
  vendor:               ASUSTeK
  model:                ASUS Battery
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              Thu 15 Aug 2019 07:26:48 PM EEST (45 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               discharging
    warning-level:       none
    energy:              31.774 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         32.166 Wh
    energy-full-design:  43.046 Wh
    energy-rate:         8.154 W
    voltage:             11.55 V
    time to empty:       3.9 hours
    percentage:          98%
    capacity:            74.7247%
    technology:          lithium-ion
    icon-name:          'battery-full-symbolic'
  History (charge):
    1565886408  98.000  discharging
  History (rate):
    1565886408  8.154   discharging

I'm at 98% in battery life at 72% of it's estimated capacity (energy-full itself is typically an estimate).

The iconography for that specific power level just isn't available, which isn't unique to GNOME Shell really, but rather a mix of both lack of iconography support for specific levels, the actual icon upower is reporting that should be used (battery-full-symbolic in my example) as well as lack of support in specific desktop environments. GNOME recently added code to switch to using battery icon levels every 10% in GNOME Shell development builds (not 3.32 series, I checked) however it assumes you're using Adwaita icon theme, which only recently added those icons, whereas Papirus and most others don't have it (instead use battery-{ac-adapter,caution-charging,caution,empty-charging,empty,full-charged,good,low}.svg as some examples, which obviously lacks granularity).

This isn't something you can fix and it's not necessarily wrong either. Just not completely accurate or may be doing calculations differently than on macOS.