Caffeine enabled by defect on Ubuntu 16.04

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Martinx - ジェームズ wrote on 23/02/16 06:47:
> ...
> 
> On 22 February 2016 at 07:20, Matthew Paul Thomas
>> 
>> Ramon Marquez wrote on 16/02/16 19:42:
>>> 
>>> Caffeine is a package very important cause inhibits the screen 
>>> for playing videos on the web browsers. Actually is offered on 
>>> the main repository of Ubuntu 16.04 but disabled by default. I 
>>> think that Caffeine It should be enabled by default.
>> 
>> Fortunately, there is a much less bureaucratic and more reliable 
>> solution: the Web browser itself can tell Ubuntu to inhibit the 
>> screensaver.
> 
> This is also, very interesting! Seems to be a good solution, and 
> maybe more reliable...
> 
> However, it also seems odd to tell everysingle program out there, 
> to make a change, while Ubuntu can do this just once, in one
> place, for everything. Right?
> 
> ...

Ubuntu doesn’t have enough information to do this without instruction
from apps.

For example, a game’s menu screen, or a DVD’s menu screen, might
include a video looping in the background. If you leave either of
those screens for long enough, the screensaver should still activate,
because the video is not something the user will actively be watching.
(Especially if you fell asleep while watching the DVD, before it
returned to the menu screen.) Ubuntu can’t know this, because it
doesn’t know the purpose of the video. Only the app does.

Now, those kinds of video are the minority. So maybe it would have
made sense for the video frameworks to have the opposite default —
saying to apps, “I’ll inhibit the screensaver while playing, unless
you tell me otherwise”. But they didn’t, so app developers have to
remember more often. But at least that is far, far more reliable than
the Caffeine approach of expecting the user to remember to turn it on
and off (and be awake to turn it off) every time.

- -- 
mpt
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