Gentoo just pulled KDE3 away from me. Now I try to use KDE4. I have a battery icon in the panel, but it does not show remaining time any more (only percent). Can this be fixed or am I supposed to live with it?

Remaining time was removed by the Plasma developers as time remaining was seen as a unreliable estimate based on battery, system load, etc. The issue remains contested currently ( as other "unreliable" estimates are provided, such as download time remaining )

For me percentage is as much unreliable as the time was. On my d630 I can spend more than 15 min on 6% while prevoius 4% ( I mean 10% -> 6% ) gets sucked in 2 or 3 minutes.
On the other hand, for me, no time calculation leaves the impression of the application not being finished or broken.

imo even unreliable time would be better then no time at all. After all everyone knows and got used to teh fact it is an estimated not precise value

Unfortunately this is not the view of Aaron Seigo at this time. It is unlikely to be changed for KDE 4.4 at this point in time.

For me, the remaining time indicator in KDE 3 was exceptionally reliable. It's true that it depends on workload, but if it starts draining more battery, the remaining time changes, as in "at the current rate, you have this much time left."

Well, Sebastian Kügler has left a convoluted hack to re-enable the time left here. Despite talking about Kde 4.4, it also works on 4.3

Am I the only one hating the (apparent) dumbing down and removal of configurations in Kde?

I don't mind. Actually battery time is an issue on certain systems like the EeePC, where the battery reports flat out bogus information to the kernel.

Ok, I apologize if I insulted anyone, just feeling frustrated having to hunt for configurations.

I can understand developers not wanting to have the computer lie to users.