Re: gnome 3

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek gentoo org>]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 3:41 AM, Josselin Mouette <joss debian org> wrote:
> Le jeudi 14 avril 2011 à 05:17 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre a écrit :
>> Other people want it because suspend doesn't work on their hardware.
>> Adding a configuration option is just putting wallpaper over the
>> cracked wall; the real solution is to fix suspend.
>
> I’m sorry but I don’t buy this. Suspend is among the things that have
> always been broken, mostly because of broken BIOSes. As long as we don’t
> have control over the hardware, we can’t be sure it works.
>

You're absolutely right. This is precisely the reason why Apple is
able to ship quality OSes that boot fast, work as expected, and give
excellent performance (iOS and OS X). OTOH, my own machine has a
partially-working suspend because the media keys stop working on
resume[1].

This is why I think GNOME should start a marketing campaign of
"Awesome Hardware" which is known to work flawlessly, and "Sadface
Hardware" which is known to work, but with glitches. This can help
users make informed choices while buying machines (or building them),
and would help us improve hardware support for Linux as well. In most
cases, it's just the last 1% that's left.

This is quite similar to the wireless hardware whitelists/blacklists
that we've been using for a while.

>> And in the meantime, the wallpaper should be to detect suspend works
>> as intended, and do something else if you can't.
>
> How can it detect that? There are just way too many ways it can fail.
> Some machines will suspend but never resume. Some will resume but in a
> wrong state. At that moment it’s too late to detect that suspend doesn’t
> work. (And if you are talking about a whitelist/blacklist, then think of
> its maintenance too.)
>
> Even worse than the “suspend on lid close” behavior, is the idea to
> suspend instead of shutting down. Computers are not all laptops, some of
> them require to be unplugged sometimes. Laptops are not all used
> everyday; they do not last more than 2 days in suspend mode.

I honestly think that the solution to this problem is suspend-hybrid
support[2]. Write hibernate image to swap, then turn off disk and
suspend to ram. That way if you pull the plug or the laptop battery
dies, the machine just resumes on boot, and you don't lost any of your
work. This is precisely what Apple already does.

> Add to that
> the need to reboot to install kernel updates.
>

I think this would be handled via PackageKit integration — you get
prompted to reboot/relogin when an update is installed that needs such
a thing.

> You need to take into account that the vast majority of our users use
> PC-class hardware. And you might not like it, but with such hardware
> they need to learn the difference between reboot, shutdown and suspend.
> It’s true that it should not be the case, but if you want to fix that
> you should develop hardware, not software.

As I said above, if we get suspend-hybrid support added to the kernel,
computers that run directly off AC mains are covered as well.

Cheers,

1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/657338
2. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560085

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team