[Utopia] Re: [Gnome-Power-Devel] power mgmt in GNOME; requirements?

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 20:18 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > When I'm sitting in the park and my laptop is running on battery I want
> > it to suspend after 10 minutes. When it's plugged into mains at work I
> > want it to be two hours. Look at the XvsXP site I posted in my original
> > mail for more examples.
> > 
> > > Is what I've done currently the right sort of profile thing or is there
> > > a better way.
> > 
> > Please elaborate.
> 
> At the moment there are two different combos for "on mains" and "on
> batteries" for all the suspend type stuff. I.e. you can set to suspend
> after 10 minutes if on battery, and after 1 hour if on mains. 

Yeah, I see that. I would shuffle the dialog around so it's more
intuitive though, something like OS X one http://www.xvsxp.com/power/ ;
that one is really good.

So, I'd have single combo box for settings (default to whatever state
the system is in) and two tabs "Sleep" and "Options"

 +-------------------------------------------+
 |                                           |
 | Setting: [Power Adapter / Battery Power]  |  <--- visible only if
 |  _________________                        |       the system have
 | | Sleep | Options |                       |       batteries. For
 | +---------------------------------------+ +       desktop systems it
 | |                                       | |       is not visible
 | |           (stuff goes here)           | |
 | |                                       | |
 | +---------------------------------------+ |
 |                                           |
 | [X] Display icon in notification area     |
 |                                           |
 |                                   [Close] |
 +-------------------------------------------+

Things I in the current preference dialog that I wouldn't include

 - "Sleep type"; it doesn't make sense to ask the user about this [1]
 - "Display icon on toolbar"; fix up wording and make it a global option
 - "Primary Batteries"; not interesting to the user
 - "Buttons"; move this to "Options" [2]

Also, I wouldn't mention anything about Wireless Mice etc. in the
preferences dialogs at all - the only visible place in g-p-m for such is
to put up a warning when the battery is low (maybe show them too for the
tooltip for the notification icon).

How about that?

[1] : g-p-m should simply choose itself what sleep state to put the
computer in; over time, for ACPI systems this may be S1 (sleep) -> S3
(deeper sleep) -> S4 (suspend to disk AKA hibernate) after SLEEP_TIME,
2*SLEEP_TIME and 3*SLEEP_TIME. 

Either way, the point is that the user will have difficulty figuring the
difference between "Suspend" and "Hibernate" and frankly he should never
have to spend time worrying about the difference.

[2] : ideally I wouldn't have them but just "do the right thing" when
the lid is closed (suspend etc.) but unfortunately we cannot assume that
since distros want to ship g-p-m with sleep completely disabled since
ACPI on Linux blows out of the box.

> Are you
> suggesting a policy for switching manually? Is there any need for this?

No no, I'm not suggesting the user should switch manually :-)

Cheers,
David