One thing that’s still surprisingly missing on Linux is a nice, modern tool to properly monitor your laptop’s battery health. Sure, there are a few utilities here and there, but nothing that feels both polished and complete.
That’s where Wattage comes in — and it fills that gap beautifully.
Wattage is a small, modern GTK4 / libadwaita application that displays a detailed overview of your battery’s condition and technical metrics. And when we say detailed, we really mean it: charge cycle count, current capacity, voltage, health status, energy metrics, manufacturer information, and more are all available at a glance.
The application is written in Vala, which compiles down to C, making it lightweight and fast. It reads all its data directly from:
/sys/class/power_supply
which is the Linux system directory where power device information is exposed.
One of Wattage’s nice features is that it supports multiple batteries and power sources simultaneously. If your system has more than one battery (or a hybrid setup), everything is displayed cleanly inside the same interface.
The interface itself is intentionally minimalist and well-designed. All battery information is displayed in a single window, with no clutter, no confusing menus, and no unnecessary options — just the data you actually care about.
So instead of relying on the basic system tray indicator that only shows a percentage, you can now see your battery’s real condition. If its health starts declining, if the charge cycle count grows too high, or if the maximum capacity drops compared to the original design capacity — you’ll know immediately.
Wattage is developed by v81d, it’s open-source and licensed under GPL v3, and it’s available on GitHub. Like most modern Linux desktop apps, it’s also published on Flathub, which means you can install it on almost any distribution in just a couple of clicks — Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Mint, and more — as long as you have Flatpak installed.
In short: if you care about the long-term health of your laptop battery, Wattage is a simple, elegant, and genuinely useful little tool to have on your system 😊
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This works fine on my Frameworks laptop with Fedora, but it fails to load in Sparky Linux om a tablet which otherwise works fine I could not use apt for this and could mot use flathub either so I installed it through the Aptus Installation of Sparky Linux which worked once I used the Terminal installation. Unfortunately it populates as a program while doing nothing!
Thanks for the feedback
Wattage reads battery information directly from the Linux power supply interface located in `/sys/class/power_supply`. On most modern distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Mint, etc.), these kernel interfaces are exposed normally, which is why the application works as expected there.
If Wattage opens but doesn’t display any data, it usually means the system isn’t exposing the expected battery metrics through that path, or the hardware/driver on that device reports power information differently.
Since you mentioned installing it through Sparky’s Aptus tool, it might also be related to the package version or missing runtime components. In many cases, the Flatpak version from Flathub tends to work more consistently because it ships with the required dependencies.
It would be interesting to check whether your device actually exposes battery data in `/sys/class/power_supply` (for example BAT0 or similar). If that directory doesn’t contain the usual metrics, Wattage won’t have anything to read.
Thanks again for sharing your experience — it can definitely help other users running similar setups.