Short sprint on power management
Thomas Pfeiffer
colomar at autistici.org
Thu Nov 22 14:39:26 UTC 2012
Hi,
whenever I try to actually use my PA tablet, I painfully notice that
power management on PA is currently pretty much broken, conceptually and
as a result practically.
Currently there are three pretty serious bugs related to this in Bugzilla:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304877
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310377
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310506
The conceptual problem underlying these bugs is
- We have three ways to set energy-related options:
- Settings -> Screen
- Battery Plasmoid
- "Energy Saving" (the Desktop KCM, can only be launched via search
in the Launcher)
- The one which currently always trumps any others (regarding both
automatic locking/suspend/shutdown and screen brightness) is Energy
Saving, the one that is - rightfully - hidden from the user.
- This has the consequence that any changes users make using the methods
which are visible to them (Battery Plasmoid and Settings) have no effect
or are reset automatically after a short while
Another shortcoming is that the Screen module isn't very well thought
through:
- "Turn off the screen" and "Sleep" don't make any sense as separate
options in PA because after the screen is locked, the device goes to
sleep anyway (turning off the screen as well, of course), so they can
just be removed
- Imo it does make sense to have different settings for AC vs. battery
power and low power on a tablet as well.
- Maybe tablets are not connected to AC a lot, but especially when
doing big updates, it makes sense to plug it in and especially during
that, you don't want it to go to sleep every few minutes as it
interrupts the process every time
- When the battery is low, it does make sense to dim the screen
To summarize, our current power management is in desperate need of
improvement, and this is something that affects every user. So if we
spend a sprint on Alarms, which some users probably won't even need, no
matter how good they are, we should spend one on power management as well.
Unless the "battling power management setting methods" problem proves to
be very complicated to solve, a 1-week-sprint should suffice for this.
What do you think?
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