The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Dario Freddi]

On Saturday 01 October 2011 23:33:22 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Saturday, October 01, 2011 11:21:46 PM Dario Freddi wrote:
> > On Saturday 01 October 2011 23:09:27 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > NO. The proposal says if the user wants fancy power management REGARDLESS
> > of the battery state, he has to use an activity. If you have never used
> > the applet for changing a profile, you will not even notice this change,
> > except for a small change in the UI.
> 
> I understand that if someone has not tried to create a profile before this
> is ~no change.
> 
> The part that I think is confusing is to make is so that one changes the
> way power management works in some cases so that it's not in power
> management. It's going to confuse approximately everyone who cares that is
> not a KDE devloper.  It may be that few enough people care that aren't
> involved in KDE development that that's OK, but this is really
> counter-intuitive.

I think you are misunderstanding the problem here. I urge you to read my 
previous mail where I try to explain that if you are doing something with your 
PC, the only configurable setting which might actually help you saving power 
is brightness.

The point is not that activities should save more power, but quite the 
opposite. An activity can be used to trigger a constant inhibition or a 
special one (for example: watch a movie, and shutdown the pc after 90 mins 
regardless, as I will surely fall asleep before that).

I can only disagree on the part about developers. Pretty much every user do 
not even care about configuring power management beyond defaults, and in fact 
it's mostly developers who knew the choice was available who are complaining, 
and I don't see how being a KDE developer can help you with this new system.

I'd like to make another point clear, which summarizes what I've been trying 
to explain before: a userspace power management daemon has the first purpose 
of PREVENTING extreme power management when needed - no surprise, the biggest 
complaints I have ever got were about inhibition features. This approach is 
geared towards getting less and less in the way of the user, because when you 
are working in front of a PC, there is NOTHING I can do now from powerdevil to 
help you save power (except from brightness).

"Real world people" just kill the hardware switch for wifi when they want to 
save extreme power, and that's exactly what you want to do if you are in 
extreme need.

> 
> Scott K

-- 
-------------------

Dario Freddi
KDE Developer
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