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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Patch: Idea for saving power on laptops
From:       Florian Hackenberger <f.hackenberger () chello ! at>
Date:       2007-05-18 16:32:28
Message-ID: 200705181832.28931.f.hackenberger () chello ! at
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On Friday 18 May 2007, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> Good luck in explaining this kind of concept to the average user.
This feature (as many others in KDE) are not meant for the average user 
anyway. It would of course be disabled by default and would have to be 
explicitly activated in one of the kcm shells.

> Come on, don't you think people would have thought of this already ?
Maybe? I was unable to find any discussions on the web.

> This just can't possibly work. How about a terminal or an app like
> kdevelop or eclipse ? As a user, the last thing I want is having to
> worry if minimizing a window isn't going to wreak havoc else where
> (oops, my build has been laying there frozen for hours just because I
> minimized the terminal I had typed 'make' in). 
Well it is meant for running on batteries. Of course I can only speak for 
myself, but I'm quite often in a situation where I am on batteries and just 
want to read something or just need the laptop for a few seconds once in a 
while if I'm studying (think simplifying an equation or something). Of course 
I want it to last as long a possible, but I don't want to put it into 
suspend. Maybe I should add that my desktop is quite cluttered usually (10+ 
apps running) and I tend to leave browser tabs open if I still need the page 
a bit later (and don't want to set a bookmark). The effect is that there are 
some of apps eating up my CPU and preventing it from entering the various 
sleep states. Summing it up, the problem are mostly the web pages and 
therefore an entry in the kwin popup menu would be most adequate. There are 
already some entries in the menu which have very rare use cases (No Border, 
Keep below others). One more would not be that bad. And yes I admit it is a 
rare use case. Maybe I should have pointed that out earlier.

> This is putting in the 
> user's hands some decisions which belong to the OS (allocating CPU to
> apps). And unless I see tests indicating otherwise, I'm pretty
> convinced the power saving gains will be barely measurable, because
> the OS already allocates CPU to apps according to their needs, so a
> minimized app won't eat much anyway (unless it's actually doing
> something useful).
The OS does not know anything about the X server and therefore does not know 
which windows (processes) the user interacts with. Furthermore if there is 
processing power available it will just give it to any process asking for it. 
And while I realise that the misbehaving applications (firefox and konqi 
should probably stop scripts and plugins running on pages in inactive tabs) 
should just be fixed, it is however a nice workaround for something which 
annoyed me for months.

Cheers, Florian

-- 
Florian Hackenberger
student @
University of Technology
Graz, Austria
florian@hackenberger.at
www.hackenberger.at
 
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