The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 02.10.11 14:25:48, Dario Freddi wrote:
> On Sunday 02 October 2011 10:48:45 todd rme wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org> wrote:
> > >> 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 nobody here is going to tell you that its indeed change, there
> > > will be a change in what some people need to do. Hell, you might even
> > > have to start using activities! But its good change, change that makes
> > > the mental load less after the initial hump.
> > > 
> > > At the same time it should be stressed that if you don't have any
> > > advanced- power management requirements, the only change you will notice
> > > is that you need to care even less about the power management as more is
> > > done automatically for you.
> > 
> > I don't think anyone is suggesting we shouldn't allow users to tie
> > power management to activities.  I think the point is we shouldn't
> > require it.  Of course integrating the power management with activites
> > make sense, but I don't think making that the only way to configure
> > your power profiles makes sense.  That is the point of disagreement
> > here.
> 
> And this is the part nobody is apparently getting. We are not forcing anybody 
> into using activities, as all the use cases for changing a profile manually 
> are actually non-existent. All the profiles for battery states will be there 
> and will be editable, and temporary inhibition (equivalent to a 
> presentation/movie profile) will be provided by the applet instead of the 
> profile combobox.

That leaves out the use-case of not wanting to inhibit all aspects of
the current power-save mode, but only a part by switching to a different
mode that is similar but differs in one or two aspects. I can think for
example for powersave-for-movie mode that dims display (because the
movie is shown on a TV) but does not suspend to ram/disk or turn off
monitors. Requiring people to create an activity for that even if thats
the only one (besides the one they use all the time otherwise) is
a regression compared to the current state.

Andreas