Re: The good, the bad, the insane

[Jesse Hutton <jesse hutton gmail com>]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com> wrote:

On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 20:24 +0100, Martin Häsler wrote:

> > So for me, your math is wrong. Why? Because before I could actually
> > suspend my desktop and had a convenient interface for doing it, I didn't
> > power it off: I just left it running, so when I stumbled to my desk in
> > the morning it'd be up and running and in the state I left it
> > immediately.Now, I can suspend it at night and resume it in the morning
> > and achieve the same result. For me, working and conveniently-accessed
> > suspend mode results in me saving power, not using more.

> I guess energy prices in the US are still way too low,

I'm not in the US.

> but leaving aside
> your
> energy wasting habits, I never argued against a suspend option.
> I just don't want it to be the only option in the user menu.
> Also you act like you couldn't suspend under the old design, which is of
> course not true.

Well, step back and look at the bigger picture. Why does Shell have a
Suspend option and no Power Off option by default (and originally,
before the Alt hack, had no Power Off option *at all*)? The idea was to
influence people in the direction of seeing suspend/resume as the normal
"I'm done for now / Now I'm starting working again" mechanism, much as
it is on phones, which most people rarely turn off.

The question is, why? Why did the designers want to mirror the typical power mode of a smart phone? Isn't there a vast difference in the utility and power consumption between the two? Yes, it seems small--and I can still shutdown my computer in numerous ways including the command line, etc--but this strikes me as one of the more arrogant design decisions I've witnessed. And it potentially has real implications in the world, ie. users' power usage.

 

If you expose a
Power Off option with equal weight to the Suspend option, this influence
is lost, and the inertia of current habits will mean people continue to
see Power Off as the 'normal' way to stop using the system, particularly
on desktops...which may mean they don't do it at all, and don't think to
suspend instead.

It may also mean that people simply power off their computers when they're not using them.

 

Providing only a Suspend option adjusts the balance of
the decision.

Quite heavily. Leaving functionality in a non-visible state by default in the interface basically means, "you should not do this." It de-legitimatizes it.

Let me describe my general usage. I have a nice dual monitor desktop at home which runs F15 and a personal laptop (SSD drive) running the same. I work during the day on a nice dual monitor desktop running RHEL 6. On most week days, I only use my desktop at home during the evening, and usually not for serious work. Why would I wan't to suspend that for 18-20 hrs a day rather than powering off?

I carry my laptop to work and back, but don't use it every day. Sometimes, I don't use it for a week. In such a case, if it's left in suspend mode, the battery may die. So, I will often power off my laptop if I don't have plans of using it later in the day.

My workstation at the office has a power saving strip where the current to everything on my desk is controlled by the PC. I'm at the office for ~10 hrs a day. Why the hell not shut it down and save power while I'm not there for the other 14hrs? Eclipse and Emacs remember all the files I had open. Firefox remembers all the tabs I had open. Evince remembers where I was in each document. And, I can get my coffee while it's booting in the morning (booting myself at the same time :-).

So, despite what the designers want people to do (and for whatever their reasons are), I'm going to continue to powering off the systems I use for what I consider to be very legitimate reasons, and continue to mumble "WTF?" to myself every time I think about how it's been relegated to a second class (or worse) operation in Gnome Shell.

Jesse