Cinnamon battery indicator only shows one battery

[Elladan]

Using Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.1 on a Thinkpad T440s, the battery indicator only shows information about one battery on my status bar.

This computer model is always configured with two batteries: a replaceable external one, and a permanent internal one.

Both batteries are detected, so I can click on the battery icon to see a list. But this is a pretty terrible experience: usually only the external battery is displayed (though this is semi-random. Occasionally the order will be swapped).

So, when my battery is draining, I usually see it drain down to 5% as the external battery discharges, and then it just sits there like that for hours while the internal battery invisibly drains.

There is also no indication which battery is which: they're both just "Laptop battery."

A reasonable interface would be to label each battery like "Laptop battery 1" "Laptop battery 2" and then make the icon show the average charge. Or, you could have two icons.

On a related note, I'm not really sure what the actual /icon/ is showing me. It's tiny and basically illegible, so I'm really just looking at the charge % number. I assume that everyone does this, because it's basically impossible to see how full the tiny icon is. I think the icon may actually be an average, while the number isn't?

(One other note: the icon /actually/ shows three batteries: it's somehow decided that my bluetooth mouse is a third laptop battery, and actually just tells me I'm at 38% all the time. I opened a different bug for that).

[Elladan (elladan)]

I've upgraded to Linux Mint 17.2.

The battery indicator now doesn't show any percentage at all. I click "Configure" and select "Show percentage." No percentage is shown -- the setting does nothing.

I don't know if the icon is supposed to indicate something, but it looks like a full battery even though one battery is at 97% and the other is at 17%.

Thus, my interpretation is that this bug has gotten worse in 17.2.

[Elladan (elladan)]

Another update:

The battery indicator started showing a percentage a few minutes after I posted the above, but the actual percentage it shows is complete nonsense.

With one battery at 100% and the other one at 92%, it showed 86%. After using the computer for a while, the 92% battery is down to 87%, and it still shows 86%.

[Yaniv (yaniv-amram)]

I've also encountered with this issue.
Using Mint v17.2 running on Lenovo X240s.

[Elladan (elladan)]

Upgraded to Linux Mint 18.

This issue still exists. As an additional data point, the percentage next to the battery icon disappears whenever both batteries are inserted, but re-appears in the rare case that I remove the external battery.

The names of the batteries are now based on a hardware description (which is only editable for the internal battery) when I click on the battery icon, but the popup when I mouse over it still just says "Laptop battery"

[Cloudane (cloudane)]

Same here on my Thinkpad. These are very popular for Linux and this is quite a shortcoming that every other desktop seems to handle correctly (unfortunately 4 years on with no attention it doesn't look likely to be fixed any time soon)