Cinnamon: Linux mint shutsdown without warning on low battery and behaviour can't be changed

[jeroenst]

```

• Cinnamon version (cinnamon --version)
  3.6.7
• Distribution - (Mint 17.2, Arch, Fedora 25, etc...)
  Mint 18.3
• Graphics hardware and driver used
• 32 or 64 bit
  ```

Issue
When battery is running low, linux mint shutdowns without warning causing to lose any unsaved documents. Also it is not possible to change this behaviour in the power manager because it is not possible to open the drop down list when the battery is critically low at extra options.

Steps to reproduce
Take a laptop, install mint, let it drain the battery and see how it shutdowns without warning
Also take a look at the power manger drop down list at when the battery is critically low in extra options.

Expected behaviour
There should be a battery low popup before shutdown giving you time to grab your charger, also it would be better to hibernate instead of shutting down.

Other information

[claudiux]

Until this issue is resolved, there is Battery Applet with Monitoring and Shutdown (BAMS) https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/255

[kauffy]

I had this problem in my early days using Mint, with specific laptop that
had kind of an erratic battery. I installed a package called TLP, and then
later I switched it out for something called laptop-mode-tools. Also, I
installed powertop to make sure everything was optimized for the laptop.

The reason the sudden shutdown was occurring is that mint was getting the
wrong information about the state of the battery, and watching it in the
power monitor showed how are erratic this was. What was happening in my
case is that the battery charge would jump from something like 60% to 40%
then to 85% then to 32%, and sometimes it would just suddenly shut down at
35%, and what was really happening is that it was going from 35% to
something like 2%, even though the battery was really at about 35%.

[claudiux]

@kauffy: How do you know the real charge level of your battery?

Have you tried updating the bios on your laptop?

[kauffy]

My BIOS is fully updated, though updating it did not make a difference.

I used the Power Statistics application to graph the battery level and keep an eye on it. You are correct that I can't know for sure the "real" charge level, but in that particular case, when I restarted the machine, it was reporting 35%. Ultimately, I replaced the battery, which didn't solve the erratic part of it as much as reducing the impact, since the charge in the battery remains pretty stable and high-- I was clearly dealing with an old battery.

[claudiux]

Please, try this:
apt install upower gir1.2-upowerglib-1.0 libupower-glib1 upower-doc

Then, check the value returned by:
upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) | grep -E percentage | xargs | cut -d' ' -f2 | sed s/%//

Does it seem the real charge level (in %)?

[jeroenst]

Thanks for the replies. Installing a power manager by hand is not really user friendly, I think Mint should include a good power manager to compete with windows or MacOs.

I will add more bugs in the future helping to make mint a real competitor for Windows and MacOs. It really could be but it should not have these basic bugs..