The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Saturday 01 October 2011, Dario Freddi wrote:
> 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!

Not sure about coupling them with activities...

There are actually two other issues I have right now with the power 
management:

1) it has per-user settings.
This becomes really strange when multiple users are logged in into one 
notebook. This should be a systemwide setting.

2) I think I still have the problem that when the session is locked and the 
screensaver is active, power management doesn't work, i.e. the notebook 
doesn't go to sleep when I close the lid. I suspect this is also because at 
that moment no user is active so no user settings are applied.

Alex