The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Scott Kitterman]

On Saturday, October 01, 2011 08:38:09 PM Dario Freddi wrote:
> On Saturday 01 October 2011 20:07:12 Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Andras Mantia <amantia at kde.org> wrote:
> > > I can't comment on activities, never used them, nor feel the need to
> > > use them. So this sounds more like the power management applet
> > > would force me to create and use activites.
> > 
> > +1. Actually I'm confused by the concept of activities as a whole: On
> > one hand, there are libraries now for reacting to activity switching.
> > On the other hand, activities are said to include running
> > applications, so apps will be closed when switching to a different
> > activity. That seems contradictory.
> > 
> > That makes it difficult for me to see where power profiles come into
> > this game: Does this mean that when I want to switch to a different
> > profile, does this mean that I have to create a new activity when I
> > want to change to a different power profile, which would mean that all
> > running applications would close because they belong to the previous
> > activity?
> 
> I'll let the activities guru answer properly on the previous part; however,
> the point is that if you never switched a profile manually you will not even
> feel the difference, as it's simply going to behave the same way. If you
> were doing such a thing, depending on why you were switching, you might
> need to create a new activity.

I don't understand how creating a new activity represents an improvement to 
the user.  If I understand the proposal correctly the user will only use the 
power manager to change existing profiles and if they want to create an 
alternative profile they will have to us something that is not the power 
manager.  

I understand the concept of activities for things like plasma-netbook with 
search and launch and newspaper actitivies.  It makes complete sense.  So I'm 
not unfamiliar with the idea.

I don't understand how it relates to power management.  Splitting how one does 
power management into two pieces is just going to confuse people.

Scott K