Notebook batteries are fickle creatures. They don't like being charged to 100%. But they also not keen on being completely depleted. According to the conventional wisdom, to give your notebook's battery a long, productive, and healthy life, you should avoid charging it above 80% and discharging it below 25%.
Sounds simple, but how can you actually accomplish that without keeping your eyes peeled to the battery charge indicator? By letting the TLP worry about that. Install the tool on your system, configure battery charging thresholds, and leave it to TLP to take care of the rest. Here's how to do this on Linux Mint.
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Nothing lasts forever, including laptop batteries. But how do you know when your laptop's battery is ripe for a replacement? Easy: install the acpi package (sudo apt install acpi on Ubuntu and Linux Mint), run the acpi -V command, and check the line that looks something like this:
Battery 0: design capacity 4867 mAh, last full capacity 4584 mAh = 94%
In this case, the battery is at 94% of its designed capacity, so there is no cause for concern. If the value is nearing 50%, you should probably start saving for a new battery.
Since it makes sense to run battery checks regularly, you can create an alias for that. Open the .bashrc file for editing using the nano ~/.bashrc command and add the following alias:
alias chkbat="acpi -V | grep Battery"
Save the changes, reopen the terminal, and run the chkbat command.