Re: [gpm] Power Manager Upgrade

[Alfredo Matos <alfredo matos digitalself org>]

Hi all,

>From my point of view, the new interface is a big improvement. It let's
you customize all the power settings. I think that it should be
available for the users to select how their laptop will behave.

What i see in David Zeuthen's email is another issue. Non power users
just want a simple thing to fiddle width. The best compromise i can
imagine is power profiles:

The user would have on the first tab, a list of profiles that set a
default for all options:

- Maximize battery
- Maximize performance
- Balance battery and performance
- Presentation
- Custom

and so on.

All these profiles could be reached from the tray icon as well.

This would be a neat enhancement, that probably is not to hard to
achieve, and would provide the compromise between the power user and the
regular Joe.

Bye,

Alfredo Matos.


Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 00:09 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 20:09 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
>>     
>>> No, that's not flaming. The reason it was changed was that as more
>>> functionality was added it was difficult to keep the "on Ac" / "on
>>> Battery" list due to space requirements and code complexity. 
>>>       
> <snip>
>   
>>  http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/g-p-m-prefer-power-savings.png
>>     
>
> You can't physically put all the options in one page and expect it to
> fit on 800x600 - see below. :-)
>
>   
>> I'm pretty user interaction designers are terrified about that
>> regression.
>>     
>
> I'm not sure. With the 2.16 code I asked my girlfriend set up the
> brightness value when on ac and battery (she is my "is it sane" test).
>
> She set the slider on AC, then she changed the tab to battery, then
> switched the tab back to AC then to battery again. Then she changed the
> battery slider.
>
> I asked her why she did that, and she said she wanted to compare the ac
> brightness value against the battery value so she could set the
> brightness lower on battery power.
>
> I'm guessing my solution of putting the options of the same page helps
> her case, but you are correct, maybe this shouldn't be in the UI.
>
>   
>>> I agree we could do some cleanup and higification, but I think we need
>>> to stay with the "task" based tabs rather than the "state" based tabs.
>>>       
>> Why? In 2.16 you had an overview of all the settings. Now you have to
>> switch tabs and hunt around to see all the settings for the mode you're
>> in. How is that an improvement? That I can choose "power processor
>> profile"? Pretty sure, btw, that term is meaningless to lots of people
>> and personally I have a hard time finding out when I want to tweak a
>> setting like that. 
>>     
>
> Sure, understood.
>
>   
>> (Mostly I think the CPU frequency scaling (which it turns out that
>> "power processor profile" really is) should just follow the "prefer
>> power savings over performance" setting and maybe depend on how much
>> juice you got left if you are running on battery.) 
>>     
>
> No, because I find myself changing this if I find myself thinking "shit,
> this is a two hour tutorial, and I have no ac-outlet" when I want the
> scaling to kick in at the start of being on battery rather than near the
> end.
>
> I think we need some proper use-cases for this.
>
>   
>> So one suggestion is to punt all these extra settings that take up UI
>> space to gTweakUI instead
>>
>>  http://gtweakui.sourceforge.net/
>>     
>
> Not keen on this idea. I don't have this program installed, and I'm not
> sure the correct solution is "punt the settings to <randomapp>".
>
>   
>> Then you can also provide UI for all the extra options you have in
>> gconf.  Think about this way; most "power users" (or momentum users,
>> whatever) love such things and if g-p-m starts exposing stuff there
>> gTweakUI is more likely to get more exposure and long term it might help
>> the options disaster we are currently experiencing in GNOME (sadly it's
>> not only g-p-m that suffers from this terrible syndrome). In fact, g-p-m
>> might be an awesome poster child for this.
>>     
>
> Sure, but I think we should think carefully about trading simplicity in
> the UI with user power. I also have strong opinions on the
> over-simplification of GNOME, so I'm glad we're having this discussion.
>
> So we start from a blank sheet of paper (hypothetically) : what settings
> should we expose in a power management UI?
>
> I would appreciate if everyone could comment and tell me what they think
> of the old and new UI's and if they have any suggestions.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Richard.
>
>
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