Bug 205549

Dear plasma team,
I've read two ML threads about the removal of remaining time from the battery applet. I've also read your opinion about notoric unreliability of certain HW which can not report meaningful values.  Finally I read the commit message suggesting me to edit the configuration file directly.

Even though I'm a CS student, UNIX sysadmin and a developer of an extragear-hosted application, I was not able to find out how to change that particular settings by editting a text configuration file. Identifiers like "[Containments][3][Applets][13][Configuration]" look pretty system-dependant to me, and have little meaning for my mind as a programmer who has never hacked on Plasma. And even if I happen to guess a correct section, is it OK to edit the file behind Plasma's back, for example? During my attempts, vim told me that something changed the file several times. Or do I have to exit my KDE session for these changes to take effect?

Anyway, I realize that quite a lot of users and developers own a crappy laptop. I'm not one of them, I use a Thinkpad. One of nice benefits of Thinkpads is their SMAPI interface, which, among other things, provide a very reliable estimate about remaining run time. Being provided by the Embedded Controller, it is likely better than any made-up number generated by either kernel or some user-space application. I am well aware of the fact that even this number is no guarantee in any way, as significant changes in usage pattern of the laptop can shift the real running time in both directions, but for me, it's a number that usually happens to give a very usable estimate.

Back when I was using KDE 3.5, I used KThinkBat [1], an application providing UI similar to what is shipped with Thinkpads on Windows. I got used to this interface and was happy with information it provided. It was pretty usefull to know before the meeting or lecture begun whether I should find a power cord. When I switched to KDE4, I immediately saw a cellphone-like indicator. Granted, I'm probably not an average Joe, but this seemd like a reduction of functionality. I feel confused, because I'm used to better precision than four bars (and BTW, both Siemens C65 and Nokia 6300 kept showing all bars for at least half of the battery time, while right now, my battery is charged at 94%, yet I see only three bars).

In the ML thread, there was a suggestion to wait for users' complaints. Hence I'm writing this bugreport. I wanted to say that I do not like current indicator which is, in my opinion, pretty limited in design and does not provide sufficient information that I expect to see, and which is provided by the mainstream operating system. Please consider reworking the indicator.

[1] http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=31529