The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Dario Freddi]

Hello all, and sorry for cross-posting.

Me and Bjorn have been discussing extensively about how to improve the current 
situation with Power Management in KDE. We focused on simplicity, still 
without losing power-user features. And we have a plan I'd like to share and 
get some feedback on.

The first, important part: we plan to remove the "Warning" step and the 
possibility of creating profiles manually. The reason behind this choice will 
be clearer later. So we will have just 3 static profiles: one for AC power, 
one for the PC running on battery, one for the PC running on low battery.

At the same time, the combobox for selecting a profile in the battery applet 
will be removed. It will, although, be replaced by a toggle button for 
inhibition: by enabling/disabling it, power management features regarding 
screen suspension, notifications and screen power management will be 
suspended. Technically speaking, the battery applet will trigger a full 
inhibition on the power manager while this button is still on.

And how do we cope with the users wanting to have very specific behavior in 
certain situations? This is where activities kick in. We will allow to 
configure a "profile" for each activity, if the user wants to, in two 
different ways: action override and profile override. Let me expand.

Suppose you want to have an activity named "Sleep", in which you watch a 
movie, and the PC will shutdown after 90 mins of inactivity. In this case, you 
would just specify to override the "Suspend Session" action. Or, you want to 
have an activity where you always want a profile which lets you run at full 
speed. You can define a whole new profile for it. Bottom line: manual profiles 
become "activity profiles".

Hopefully, this solution will please everyone and will make activities even 
more useful. Do you like it? More suggestions? Speak now or shut up forever!

-- 
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Dario Freddi
KDE Developer
GPG Key Signature: 511A9A3B
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