Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
@gearheart @Jezebelley can you emulate that by doing a cat on whatever file the ACPI or whatever subsystem handles battery levels? Maybe a script with a sleep to not hammer the level check all the time and then piping that somehow into the status bar?