I admit, I've never thought to myself "Hmmm, I wonder how much power my laptop uses right now." Still, I stumbled upon a new GNOME Shell extension that does just that, and it's pretty cool (in a nerdy/geeky kind of way).

It's called Power Tracker and allows users to monitor their power consumption and battery usage on any GNOME-based Linux distro.

Of course, there are a lot of Linux tools that can display this sort of information (with a lot more details). Some good examples include upower (a command-line tool) and the good ol' Power Statistics (an app included by default on Ubuntu and some other GNOME-based distros).

The beauty of Power Tracker is that it lives in the GNOME top bar. This provides users with a cool and discreet way of checking out their energy consumption without actually having an active app on the desktop.

Here are a few things you need to know about this extension. For starters, the refresh rate is a fixed 3 seconds (you might be able to tweak it in future releases, though). Secondly, the extension has no dependencies and is designed to work straight out of the box.

It can be installed directly from the EGO platform or, even easier, via the amazingly convenient Extension Manager.

The extension seems to be working flawlessly on GNOME 46 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as well).

To conclude, Power Tracker is not what one might call a precise tool. For once, the accuracy is pretty damn near impossible to determine. Secondly, there's the three-second refresh rate. Still, it's a nice little extension that might be fun toying around with.