Re: The future of session management in GNOME

["Tommi Komulainen" <tommi komulainen iki fi>]

On 9/13/06, Brian Nitz <Brian Nitz sun com> wrote:
> Why do we ever log out?
>     4) Free up resources.   ???
>
> Reason 4 is especially interesting for multiuser systems, especially
> thin clients.  It might be interesting for embedded uses of GNOME
> (laptop/child, maemo...) to reduce resources when user isn't looking.

For single user embedded case I can't suddenly think of anything
logging out would provide that idle/screensaver mode and offline mode
wouldn't. When the user isn't watching you should've already stopped
all timers and screen updates. Except for possible music playing and
network transfers, when the screen is blanked nothing should be
happening.

Also doing more work (saving state, shutting down applications) just
to do more work later (restarting the apps, restoring state) might not
be the brightest idea unless you know the extra memory would be better
spent elsewhere (but where? nothing should be happening when the user
isn't looking.)


--
Tommi Komulainen                                 tommi komulainen iki fi