Hello everyone,
I am using OpenSuse Tumbleweed with MATE 1.20.3 (that’s what mate-about says).
I have a recurrent problem with the battery indicator applet on the panel, after suspending the laptop several times (I suspend it every night) the applet does not update the current status of it.
For example, right now it’s connected and charging, but it displays “Laptop battery discharging (70%)”.
I know for sure that if I restart the laptop or restart the Desktop Environment it will update the status properly, but it’s not what I want (right now I have 7 days of uptime).
How can I know if it’s related to MATE?
This is the output of acpi:
acpi -a
Adapter 0: on-line
acpi
Battery 0: Unknown, 70%
In Ubuntu I have seen similar occasional power manager freeze issues dating all the way back to the old Gnome 2 roots of MATE - they finally got it working really well a few years back - just in time for some well meaning fools to decide that we needed to toss it all in the garbage so we could let systemd be the "one ring to rule them all" and everything got flaky again.
It did improve over time update-by-update, and in Ubuntu MATE 16.04, things are now working nice and stable for me (so long as I don't try to run any fancy screen savers, which will still lock things up).
My previous occasional power manager freezes seem to have been related to interaction between the kernel power management and the panel app, and the only thing I have found that would work around the problem was to open a terminal and kill the mate-panel with:
killall mate-panel
... and then let the desktop automatically restart and reload the panel and all the panel applets.
Also, since this could be a generic power management issue, have you tried another desktop like xfce or lxde to see if the power management is stable? I ask because I have had laptops which would lock up outright without kernel parameter tweaks during boot, so clearly power management is much more of an issue on some hardware than others, so it may be a generic issue with the newer systemd acpi kernel drivers.