The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Thomas Zander]

> I mean, the profile can be changed by switching Activities, so what is the
> technical reason it cannot be done by the user directly? The reason I'm
> concerned is that it takes concepts (power management policy, current
> Activity) which, although related, are orthogonal and then artificially
> combines them.

As I understand the reasons for all those questions is the same; its a natural 
fit.
I'm not sure why you wrote they are orthogonal as the two concepts are 
perfectly in line as far as I can tell.

I've always had a slightly different take on activities, one that has not 
really been advertised as such, maybe my view may make the relation between 
power profiles and activities a bit more clear.

In KDE we reached a point where various technologies needed to 'guess' what 
the user was doing.  You can see this go back as far as the kde3 app that 
allowed you to register how much time you spent on some tasks. Excellent 
tool  for consultants ;) It had a setting that started/stopped the clock based 
on the virtual desktop.
Later we got nepomuk which makes different relations and data structures 
based on some settings.
We got an offline mode in kdepim. Which later evolved into an offline mode in 
the network manager, which later evolved into the offline mode in solid.
We have power-management profiles.
There is a way for apps to say they are in 'presentation mode' so the 
screensaver doesn't kick in.  

All these settings *can* be managed individually, but you probably know that 
most users don't want do make those settings manually, everytime something 
changes.
Anyone that is in a company with plenty of meetings knows that people don't 
turn off their screensaver or their ICQ/jabber when doing a presentation.

So the way I see activities is that you can map a lot of those settings that 
are frankly all over the place onto a real-world activity.
Plasma added a nice user interface for it and things suddenly became more 
consistent.

So to go back to the initial point, in my view the power management and the 
activities concept are not at all orthogonal, its a natural evolution.
-- 
Thomas Zander