It's great that the indicator applet tells me I have 2 hours and 12 minutes of battery left, or that it will be charged in 1 hour 8 minutes, but I might well change my pattern of usage during that time and am frankly not confused by percentages.
How do I make the applet show a percentage charged or discharged instead?
Best Answer
Matthew Paul Thomas, an interface designer for Canonical's Ubuntu team, in his blog comments this April wrote "I think the only point in showing a percentage charge is so that a human can get an idea of how much time is left. But we have computers to do those sort of calculations now. If a battery’s estimated time remaining is wrong, its percentage will be even less informative."
There is also a comment on the Ubuntu wiki that says "This coloring is deliberately time-based, not percentage-based; how much time you have left is more important than how long the battery can theoretically last."