I need a Battery Status icon.

[deleted]

Hello everyone, new Linux user here, about a month. After trying two other Distros on my new Laptop, I'm now with Solus and the KDE Plasma Desktop. Everything seems fine so far except for I'd like to get a battery status icon down in the tray or whatever it's called. How to get a little battery icon in the lower right corner of the Desktop?

WetGeek

[deleted] If you right-click on the bottom panel to go into edit mode, and click on the Widgets link, there's a battery/brightness widget right near the top of the list.

Install that on your panel, and you'll have an icon you can click to display this.

What all it displays depends on what's associated with that computer. On a laptop, it always displays the battery condition. I use it on my laptop to control screen brightness, too, as at 100% it's way too bright to look at for very long.

Brucehankins

[deleted] on Plasma, follow WetGeek's instructions to enter edit mode for the panel and hover over System Tray and click on configure.

Make sure that Battery and Brightness are set to Always Shown.
Now right click the battery icon and select show battery percent on icon

Just a note, as you can see in my screenshot, it's incredible small and hard to read. Not much use on a 15.6" or smaller display. I'm sure there's a widget you can download that will do better, but that's how you'd enable battery percentage on the pre-installed and pre-configured Plasma.

Hope this helps!

[deleted]

Thank you, that is very helpful. I did follow your directions, I did get a Battery and Brightness Monitor Widget icon in the tray, however when I click on the icon I only get brightness and bluetooth, no battery function or percentage! Yes, I keep my Laptop screen brightness down to conserve battery life, and on my Android Tablets and cell phone I usually use Dark Mode.

WetGeek

[deleted] I only get brightness and bluetooth, no battery function

I'm sorry to hear that. I know that the widget is sensitive to the starus of things that it's monitoring. For example, sometimes mine comes up without the Bluetooth Keyboard, because it's not being used. If I then press a key (e.g., the spacebar) it is displayed immediately.

On any laptop, I'm very surprised that the battery state isn't displayed, but I don't have a suggestion for you, because I've never seen that happen. Maybe you could plug in the AC/charger and see if it appears with the battery being charged. The reason my screenshot showed 100% for the battery is because it's plugged in and running on AC.

[deleted] I keep my Laptop screen brightness down to conserve battery life

I keep it at 50% to conserve my eyes. 🙂

EDIT: Maybe a reboot would help connect the widget to the laptop's features? I'm trying to think of any reason why my battery state should appear and yours doesn't, using the same DE and the same widget. That's about all I can think of. My laptop has been rebooted after every weekly upddate.

[deleted]

WetGeek I constantly reboot my Laptop, even after installation of single applications. I can't get any battery Widgets-Applets to work with Solus Plasma on this Laptop, but I did get the battery Widgets, icons to work with an installation of both KDE Neon and Fedora Plasma, so it's more likely a Solus issue. What I'd like to do is download and install a full authentic version of KDE Plasma, see if it does all it's supposed to do.

[deleted]

Brucehankins
Hello, thank you for your reply. I've already received that same suggestion at another forum. My Edit screen doesn't even look nearly the same as yours, I don't get System Tray Settings, Entries option, it isn't there. I do have the Edit mode, but it's somewhat different on this Distro than what I've seen on other Distros with KDE. I'm thinking that this installation doesn't realize that this is a Laptop, hence no battery management. Oh, I can see all your Screenshots just fine, plenty large. I did add a Battery and Brightness Widget and it says there is no battery, so obviously its not an option, the system doesn't know it's there. By the way this is a new Micro$oft Surface Go Laptop. I previously did an Ubuntu installation with Gnome and it did recognize the battery, but it was kind of not right though it doesn't matter at this point.

Brucehankins

[deleted] Are you doing this in a virtual environment or are you installing to metal? Sometimes things can get wonky when you are installing in a virtual environment rather than directly to your drive.
The System Tray icon is standard I believe, if not, you can add that as a widget also. Once it's there and you're in edit mode, you can configure the System Tray, which is where you'll get the second set of options.

tomscharbach

[deleted] By the way this is a new Micro$oft Surface Go Laptop. I previously did an Ubuntu installation with Gnome and it did recognize the battery, but it was kind of not right ...

A quick look at the recent boards suggests that battery status icon issues (ranging from not showing up at all to rendering wonky results) seem to be common when using Linux on a Surface Go, for some reason. The issue seems to affect a number of distros, so the fact that you have had issues with both Solus and Ubuntu doesn't surprise me. Although a number of the threads point to a kernel issue with some versions/variants (including 5.15 variants), I have no idea what might be going on, and the proposed "solutions" I've read are all over the map. It might be that the best course available to you is to wait until the kernel updates and see if that fixes the issue.

[deleted]

Brucehankins No virtual environment. I did a full and complete bootable installation to the hard drive, no more Windows 10 on this Micro$oft Laptop! For some reason when adding the Widget it doesn't see the Battery, but other Distros with KDE Plasma do see, detect the Laptop battery percentage.

[deleted]

tomscharbach Well, what you indicated might just be the case, but I just installed Distros KDE Neon (Plasma) and also Fedora Plasma, both of which I was able to load a Battery Icon/Widget into the Tray and they both worked just fine, though Fedora takes longer to boot and for some reason takes even longer to shut down. Also, my installation of Ubuntu/Gnome did show a battery icon, though the icon percentage graph was slow to update, or was incorrect. What I'd like to do is install Solus Budgie and then also Download and install a pure KDE Plasma Desktop? I dunno much about any of this since I'm quite new, but I can easily do command line if I'm copying what will work.

tomscharbach

[deleted] What I'd like to do is install Solus Budgie and then also Download and install a pure KDE Plasma Desktop?

I'll be curious about what happens with clean installation (overwrite the disk and install Solus as the sole operating system) of Budgie because Budgie uses the Gnome stack. I'd follow @Staudey's advice in another thread and refrain from trying to install "a pure KDE Plasma" DE on top of Solus.

[deleted]

tomscharbach Well, if I screw it up, I'll just reinstall, I've become quite good at burning ISOs for several different Linux Distros, balenaEtcher works well for me. In the last month I've installed and tried Mint/Cinnamon, Ubuntu/Gnome, Solus/Plasma, KDE Neon (Plasma), Fedora/Plasma and now I'm back with Solus/Plasma.

tomscharbach

[deleted] Well, if I screw it up, I'll just reinstall ...

If the "it" is trying to trying to install "a pure KDE Plasma" DE on top of Solus, you will. Guaranteed.

murbert

[deleted] Well, if I screw it up, I'll just reinstall, I've become quite good at burning ISOs for several different Linux Distros, balenaEtcher works well for me.

Have a look at Ventoy. I have 8 or 9 distros on one 64GB thumb drive and boot whichever I want

[deleted]

tomscharbach My thought was to first install Solus Budgie, then it shouldn't be a problem to install authentic KDE Plasma. Oh, if I don't screw it up, you owe me a beer. 🙂

tomscharbach

[deleted] My thought was to first install Solus Budgie, then it shouldn't be a problem to install authentic KDE Plasma. Oh, if I don't screw it up, you owe me a beer.

Well, good luck to you. A world of difference exists between installing Budgie from the ISO and trying to substitute KDE Plasma as the DE on that installation, as @Harvey pointed out in the other thread where you discuss trying to do this.

Installing Budgie from an ISO is straightforward, but trying to install KDE Plasma on that base is difficult or impossible because the two DE's (Budgie/Plasma) have overlapping functions, dependencies, background services and applications that are not meant to coexist with one another.

Solus specifically warns against attempting this in the Help Center, which gives instructions for installing Budgie, Gnome and MATE desktops alongside each other: "WARNING: Do NOT attempt to install ANY other desktop environments next to KDE Plasma Desktop. This scenario is NOT supported and you will be told so in no uncertain terms if asking for support."

Sticking with the beer theme, I think you are embarking on a "Here, hold my beer and watch this!" adventure.

infinitymdm

Building on info from the other thread:

It's not likely that building KDE from scratch will work for you. You mentioned that you're new to Linux command line syntax, and KDE is massive. Besides, the packages that Solus uses are the same code that you would be compiling yourself. I do not recommend that you pursue this avenue - it will just be a waste of your time.

If you want to get your battery indicator issue solved, here's the information we need from you:

Device model. Microsoft has put out a device called a Surface Go, as well as a device called the Surface Go Laptop. These are two VERY different devices. Include the device model number.
Enumerate and describe in detail the issues you're having with the Solus version of KDE. Include screenshots for each item you want help with.

Lastly - It's really not productive to criticize anyone when you're trying to solve technical problems. I understand that these things can be frustrating, and it's inconvenient to have to repeat yourself. We're all just users like you, we just happen to have a bit more experience with this particular distro. Work with us and maybe we can help you out. I'd like to help you find a solution to your problem, so let's see what we can do about that, eh?

[deleted]

murbert I looked at it, I'll give it a try.

ReillyBrogan

@[deleted] Please give the exact model number of the laptop you are using. You can likely get this by checking the BIOS or seeing if it's on the same sticker as the serial number. This will help us understand your issue FAR better as we will actually know what hardware components are in your laptop.

[deleted]

ReillyBrogan The problem has already been discovered and discussed, it's specific to certain Micro$oft devices, the fix is at the Kernel level. Now all I need to know is if it's possible for me to readily patch or update the Kernel. Apparently too there may be the necessity of an UEFI firmware update, which is available from Micro$oft.