am I depleting my embedded notebook's battery by leaving the power cord constantly plugged in?
notebook is a 10 year old macbook pro without macos I installed xubuntu 24.04 in. It comes with an embedded battery.
First notebook I bought, not from apple, had a removable battery. The vendor told me to maximize its life I shouldn't plug the battery in, unless I need it (like for traveling). This way, I've managed to keep the original battery in good working condition for 8 years so far.
Back to the macbook: I cannot remove the battery and constantly loading it to up to 80% and discharge it up to 20% seems ridiculous. Furthermore, this would deplete the battery even faster, I believe.
What can I do to spare the battery as much as possible?
For linux it depends. For example, you can modify the maximum charge on ASUS laptops. There’s also this wonderful tool called asusctl [https://asus-linux.org/] that modifies allows you to more effectively use your laptop. Here is the arch wiki page for it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_Linux . Do note that, unfortunately, the only officially supported distros are Arch and Fedora, but you can make it work with some effort.