On 02/08/2011 09:37 PM, James Laska wrote:
= Comments +ACY-amp; Discussion =
Given that GNOME 3 offers a +ACo-dramatically+ACo- different user experience
than GNOME 2.X, there are going to be plenty of users who are
surprised/disrupted by the changes.  As a result, we wanted to start
compiling common questions/workarounds/workflows that have come up so
far.  I anticipate referencing these a lot on irc/lists.  Perhaps, over
time these migrate into release notes.

We need to get this list going and keep tabs on bugs filed against that design decisions and preferable point to upstream bugs/discussion(s) as Bastien did in respond to me in another thread on this list since I hit yet another case what I call a regression/bug but another might call works as designed.

We had a shitty weather last night which was perfect for me to just throw myself in the couch in the living room reading a ebook over a warm cup of coffee before you hit the sack well that did not turn out so well I spent most of the time battling "power saving" features since I was running the laptop on battery on my couch in my living room.

No matter what I did ( setting the brightness to max ) after I period of time I either had a screen lock or the display decided to dim it self again which by the way to not seem to be consistent to behaviour I set it to and going through the power settings I notice that for some reasons the ui designers have decide to remove the option "Never" and in the end I accepted defeat ( or achieved victory over power saving depending how you look at it ) and unplug one of the lamps in the living room and plug my adapter in to work around "Power saving" behaviour.+AKA-

These four bugs I encounter as in three code bugs one design bug or are these not bugs and are +ACo-working+ACo- as designed?

1.

The screen lock taking place which did not be consistent to what settings I had in power settings.

2.

The display deciding to dim it self after a period of time that did not seem consistent to what I had set to in the power settings.

3.

The display deciding to dim it self after an reset the display brightness setttings after I manually set it ( happens regardless if I used a key compo to increase it or I did so through application ).+AKA-

4.

Usability regression or a design bugs as I call them the removal of "Never" as an option and be stuck with one hour.

In case of what I refer to as bug 1. 2. 3. they are probably all related to the same problem ( probably X/Kernel bug ) as in there seems to be some underlying +ACo-intelligent+ACo- that probably is tied in what ever it has defined as user +ACo-activity+ACo- ( most likely is a key being pressed or the mouse being moved ) within a defined time frame and when that does not happen that intelligent decides to +ACo-save power+ACo- and starts doing all kinds of things to do that like ignoring ( user ) defined settings in Gnome.

Now there are several use cases that you might be doing some task in/with the laptop without that task involving a mouse being mover or user pressing a key like reading, having presentation of the device it self or simply Gnome etc..

In the case of 4 we need to have the ability to turn all "power savings" off completely. I'm not saying it should be the default far from it a good power saving policy should be the default but the ability for the user to do that needs to be in place because you might need to perform some tasks that require you to utilize all the resource the computer has cpu etc.. at the cost of saving several minutes of you battery life time.

Now one way to deal with all those various power needs/use cases the user has when running on battery would be to introduce power managing profiles where the user could select profile based on a task he's+AKA- performing like in my last nigh case I was reading so I would have chosen the "Reading" power managing profile which would have for example set the brightness of my screen to max but save power everywhere else possible and in the case of needing max performance user would just choose the Performance power management profile which would just turn of all power savings.

The benefit of having power management profile is that user could simply just choose amongst predefined profiles for the most common usage scenario and the configuration part of it could be stuffed behind/exposed to the user only under creating a custom power management but you know this just one idea that could be used to solve/satisfy various power managing tasks for various usage scenarios in a non complication to much knobs neat way for the end user.+AKA-

Note that I have not filed a single one of those bug(s) I have mentioned since I'm not sure these are bugs at all or working as designed. . .

JBG