Plasma 6.1 does not show battery percentage while charging

[maqni]

Hi everyone,
Edit: TLDR: How to display the percentage charge level of the battery permanently again?

After the update to Plasma 6.1, in my taskbar the battery symbol which I have set to show the battery percentage:

now changes into a leaf that does not show the battery percentage when my laptop is plugged in to charge:

It ignores the setting to display the battery percentage. Only when I deactivate the battery saving mode (which I use almost permanently), the leaf symbol changes back into the battery symbol that shows my battery percentage just as it used to do before the update. My battery percentage is an important information that I often check, while the information whether energy saving mode is activated is quite useless to me. Now I have to manually switch the energy profile back and forth each time I charge my laptop.

Does anyone know about a way to

• make the leaf symbol show my battery percentage, or to
• show the battery symbol permanently just as before the update to Plasma 6.1, or
• only if none of the above works, to automatically switch the energy profile when plugging and unplugging the laptop, or even to
• restore the oxygen battery symbol from Plasma 5?
  

The latter is probably impossible because the taskbar symbols can not be changed separately anymore since Plasma 6. So option 1 or 2 might be the easiest. But how?

[ricklinux]

This is weird because the only thing i see on my laptop is the battery status doesn’t show on the login screen. If you use the lock screen it shows. If you log in it shows.

[maqni]

Thank you for checking this. I can confirm that the battery symbol shows in the lock screen. It also shows the battery percentage both when running on the battery and when plugged in.
So that leaf symbol is only shown in the taskbar during the Plasma session.

I don’t know much about the symbols and what event triggers which symbol to show and so on, but is this possibly a bug? e.g. maybe someone designed this new symbol and forgot to enable it to show the battery percentage as the battery symbols do? (battery “symbols” in plural because there are different battery symbols for a full, half-full and empty battery at least in Breeze and Oxygen which I used on Plasma 5)

[manuel]

There should be a setting about it in system settings. I’m not currently using plasma, so this might be outdated info, but probably not.

[maqni]

The setting to display the battery percentage is available in Plasma when right-clicking the battery symbol, or in this case the leaf symbol:

As you can see in the screenshot (it’s in German: “Show Percentage Charge Level on Icon When Not Fully Charged”), showing the battery percentage is activated, but the percentage is not shown on the leaf symbol.

I have now tried out other icon sets, e.g. Qogir and Newaita, which don’t have this leaf symbol. The same happens: The battery percentage does not show when the computer is 1.: charging and 2.: in battery saving mode. In other cases, the battery percentage shows as expected.

Does the same happen on other systems with Plasma 6.1?

[eso]

@maqni
A pretty rudimentary workaround:
yay -S st
~/bts.sh into login startup:

#!/bin/bash
st -g=5x2 -f=Hack:size=20 -e sh $HOME/bt.sh

~/bt.sh

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
bt=$(upower -i $(upower -e | grep '/battery') | grep percentage | awk '{print $NF}')
 notify-send "Battery: $bt"
 echo "$bt"
 sleep 300
done

The st -g geometry offset works only in X11 so drag the tiny window whereever you want or
comment out and with notify-send there are -u urgency (3) levels as well similar to that of Power management but in this script you can set to different levels.

[maqni]

Thanks a lot for the tip. I have just installed st.
I have created the bt.sh and started it. A small window that displays the current battery percentage. It’s a great solution! Two questions about it:

It is a window right now; is there a way to simply put the battery percentage into the taskbar, like a small self-created taskbar widget?
As it is “A simple terminal emulator for the X Window System”, will it work well with wayland?

[jake99]

Hello, so if I got this right, you are charging your laptop and setting the power-profile to “powersave”. If that is the case, I can confirm that it happens to me too, and it looks like a bug, or they think that “leaf/eco-friendly” mode does not need battery percentage lol.

Anyway there are a lot of battery widgets on “KDE Store” that you can put in your tray get the info you need.

[maqni]

Thanks for confirming that the same happens. So it’s obviously a bug.

I have now searched through the KDE store and a number of old reddit posts and did not find any widget that would work on Plasma 6. There are some such as “Battery time” and “Simple Battery Monitor”, but unfortunately they are only for older versions of Plasma.

EDIT: I have filed a bug report on bugs.kde.org.

[eso]

Hallo @maqni ,
I was going to adjust this lovely CPU monitor for you
but here is a solution out of the box. Only minimal settings are required.

This widget is called ‘System monitor Sensor’. Just set as above on the picture.

So as for the ‘useless’ CPU monitor next to Battery
should you want to test it download and extract it, cd to where org… is and
kpackagetool6 -t Plasma/Applet --install org.kde.plasma.catwalk
and you will see among the widgets as CatWalk
(this kitten will keep the bugs away)

[maqni]

Thanks a lot @eso for the suggestion!

I have tried out CatWalk, a nice widget, though it shows CPU usage only.
Now with the System monitor sensor, I can see the battery percentage permanently again. So I mark this thread as solved.

[ricklinux]

Mine shows this on the taskbar. Lenovo ThinkBook

[maqni]

@ricklinux

Mine shows this on the taskbar.

When running on the battery, the battery symbol is the same here.
While running on battery (battery symbol, option to show charge percentage is selected):

While charging (leaf symbol, option to show charge percentage is selected but ignored):

Now the system monitor sensor widget on the left shows the battery percentage all the time. Let’s see whether the the symbol will show the percentage again soon now after a bug report to KDE Plasma is issued.

[mayhem]

i have been having the same issue as OP after upgrading to plasma 6.1. when the laptop is charging, battery percentage is only shown on balanced mode, both power save and performance mode do not show the percentage. when not charging however, all 3 modes show battery percentage.

just some (minor) growing pains imo