The future of Power Management - together with Activities

[todd rme]

Important In-Game InformationImportant In-Game InformationImportant
In-Game InformationOn Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Martin Gräßlin
<mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 01 October 2011 16:27:48 Dario Freddi wrote:
>> Hello all, and sorry for cross-posting.
>>
>> 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!
> Hi all,
>
> I urge everyone to calm down about this subject. By now I think Dario and the other Solid hackers have explained quite
> good what they want to do and sorry to say so most comments on the thread are just triggered by being badly informed.
>
> I did not understand the idea from Dario's first mail either, but now I have got the idea and completely trust in the decision
> of the experts. I am reassured that the manual tweaking is still possible - and I personally only change screen brightness
> and turn off wifi to save power. Everything else is to do the opposite and there activities are a perfect solution. If I am in
> the activity "watching video" I do not want the screen to blank. Using activities for such advanced features is as good as
> using anything else.
>
> So please calmn down and lets focus on improving the user experience by not spending too much time on too long
> threads.
>
> Thanks all and keep hacking
> Martin

Thinking over the conversation a bit, I think the disagreement stems
not from the activities vs. profiles issue, but rather different
expectations about what power management is and what it should do.
People seem to be talking past each other, and I don't think the
conversation is going to go anywhere unless people realize they are
discussing two entirely different things.

People seem to fall into roughly 2 camps.  The first seems to
represent the solid developers (amongst others), who seem to be taking
a fairly strict definition of "power management", which basically
encompasses controlling screen brightness (and some other things
handled by the kernel so there is no UI for them).  Other people,
including me, seem to be using a looser definition of "power
management", which includes disabling things that are not necessary to
save power such as wifi, strigi, screen savers (this is also the
definition used in Windows 7 at least, not that this automatically
makes it right -- or wrong).

For people using the stricter definition, things like wifi and
screensavers are separate tasks and should be handled in their own UI.
 For people using the looser definition, they are all related to the
same sort of practical issues independent of the underlying technology
so it should be possible to manipulate them together.

The current power management UI reflects the stricter definition, and
activities being sufficeint makes sense in light of that definition.
The problem arrises with people who are using the looser definition.
In this case the current UI is deficient, it lacks options nessary for
what we consider to be necessary power management settings, and
activities are not sufficient.

So the queston, then, is where this leaves us.  One of the good things
about plasma is that people can make their own UI for things.
Therefore, anyone who wants to can make an alternative power
management widget implementation that gives them all the settings they
want.  So would it be possible to develop a backend implementation
that could be used for per-activity profiles in the UI, but would
still support more complete power profiles if someone else were to
write the UI for it?  Basically try to make as few assumptions as
possible in the underlying profile settings storage.

-Todd