For those with Acer laptops running Linux on GitHub there has been an out-of-tree driver providing an experimental “acer-wmi-battery” kernel module to allow controlling battery-related features. Now a cleaned-up version of that driver is working on getting into the mainline Linux kernel.
The acer-wmi-battery driver the past two years has lived on GitHub as an out-of-tree, experimental driver for battery health controls. The functionality aims to match what is available in the Acer Care Center under Microsoft Windows. With this driver you can limit the battery charging to 80% to help preserve the battery’s capacity. There is also a battery calibration mode as a controlled charge-discharge cycle to improve the battery capacity estimations.
I use the battery health settings on my Lenovo laptop and it’s been amazing, it wasn’t even able to do this on Windows. In fact my original battery turned into a spicy pillow because Windows would just keep it at 100% all the time. I was running with no battery for a while, but finally got a new battery recently.
Now I have it set to stop charging when it reaches 80%, and it doesn’t start charging unless it’s below 60%. Probably overly safe but I love the flexibility of these controls. The charging control even works while the laptop is sleeping. And the power passthrough works properly too because the battery level never goes down while it’s plugged in.
I’m no longer afraid of leaving the laptop powered on and plugged in for long periods of time.
