Battery icon defaults

[Matthew East]

Posting to see peoples' views on this.

The gpm battery monitor only has three icons, and currently they use
misleading colours. For example, when under 50% battery life, the icon
is already orange, and around 30% left, the icon turns red.

Worse is that having 3 icons means that the monitor gives an extremely
bad impression of how full a battery is. So, at 49%, the battery icon
looks less than a third full. These two problems with the icons are in a
bug report that doesn't look like it will be fixed in this release cycle
[1].


[1] battery monitor is red even when I have over 30% battery left
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/32921


Another (minor) problem is that the battery icon appears in the
notification area, and I think that this doesn't really fit the
description of being a "notification".

The gnome applet (last time I looked, both appear by default) is a lot
better, it gives an accurate representation of how much battery is left,
and the colours are more reasonable. It also has the (splendid) option
of displaying the percentage alongside the icon. To cap it all off, it's
not in the notification area. So, all in all, lots better.

Can we please use the GNOME battery applet by default in Dapper, and set
the gpm icon to never display?

There would also be a disadvantage of this: we'd lose the ability to
right click and sleep/hibernate. But then again, in my opinion no one
will use this, because (a) it's such a strange place to put such an
ability, that very few people will find it, (b) we have the logout
applet on panels by default, which people can use for fast logout
dialogue access, and (c) most people use their function keys anyway, to
sleep/hibernate, unless they don't have these.

So, please post your opinions on this.

Thanks!

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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