The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 01.10.11 16:27:48, 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!

What happens if I don't use activities at all since they provide no use
for me? And whats also not clear to me: How can I get powermanagement
configured so it never dims down my screen brightness (since thats
making the display useless for me) even on low battery? Can I still
adjust what lid-down does in ac, no-ac and low-battery mode (the latter
currently goes into suspend-to-disk as opposed to ram)? Can I still
configure for each profile when it does the suspend? Can I still choose
what "low battery" means?

I agree though that 2 'low' levels are more or less useless, once the
battery is reaching a very low level I just want the machine to do a
suspend to disk.

Andreas