Weird downstream Power Manager changes?

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Dylan McCall wrote on 03/06/08 16:06:
> 
> On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 16:33 +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
>...
>> Am Dienstag, den 03.06.2008, 07:21 -0700 schrieb Dylan McCall:
>>> 
>>> Power Management Preferences has been needlessly crippled. The sliders
>>> to control when the computer sleeps and when the display sleeps all have
>>> a lower limit of "21 minutes".
>...
> Aha! Sorry about the double post. Just realized that the minimum is idle
> time + 1 minute, which probably makes sense somewhere. (Except for the 1
> minute part?!). Still, the fact that this basic setting of timers needed
> research to figure out suggests a need for some reorganizing. Firstly,
> idle time should be set in gnome-power-preferences, not just
> gnome-screensaver-preferences, if it has such a widespread impact.
> Furthermore, I think it is problematic that the idle time cannot be set
> differently for when on battery as opposed to when on AC power, again
> because of its tie to screensaver time. Perhaps this would make more
> sense if idle did not automatically trigger the screensaver, instead
> with another timer to handle that.
> 
> Come to think of it, I am also a little confused by what "idle" means
> here. There is "dim display when idle", which seems to have an opinion
> of its own for when idle is, dimming the screen after what seems a few
> seconds of inactivity. It does not wait for the idle time that
> everything else seems to be tethered to.
> 
> This is all assuming "idle time + 1" actually makes sense
> infrastructure-wise. I am assuming here that we somehow need
> gnome-screensaver to trigger these actions. If not, what of use does
> "idle" do, anyway, other than control the controls?
>...

So if you have the Power Management Preferences open, and you want to
set your computer to go to sleep sooner than the screensaver is
currently set to begin, you need to (1) open the Screensaver
Preferences, (2) reduce the "Regard the computer as idle after:" value
to something less than the time you want the computer to go to sleep,
(3) switch back to the Power Management Preferences, and (4) change the
"Put the computer to sleep when inactive for". That's rather silly.

The "Regard the computer as idle after:" slider is an example of a
needless abstraction. I don't need help from a slider to regard my
computer as idle. "You're a lazy, slovenly computer who has never done
anyone any good!" See? Worked perfectly.

Anyway, this is reported upstream:
<http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427815>

Cheers
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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