Xfce4 power manager 0.6.0 RC1 released

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:23:02 +0100 Ali Abdallah wrote:

> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > Am Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:26:51 +0100
> > schrieb Ali Abdallah <aliov at xfce.org>:
> >
> >   
> >>> 3. I'm seeing radio buttons labelled with cpu governour names. I
> >>> wonder if it is all that helpful, as opposed to describing
> >>> strings. I would think it would make it more understandable to
> >>> less knowledgable users and still be obvious enough for those who
> >>> do know. ^^ Granted, others might see that different.
> >>>
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> yes, but powersave,performance and ondemand are clear i guess,
> >> only conservative and userspace aren't understandable, but i don't
> >> know what to put here.
> >>     
> >
> > You can't expect the user to know anything about how CPU governours
> > work, neither what the terms powersafe, performance and ondemand
> > mean. So if you want the UI to be useful for everyone you'll have
> > to describe these terms in some way.
> >
> >   - Jannis
> >   
> >   
> 
> Can be as a tooltip on each radio button, what do you think, if not i 
> have to find a clear way to show these governors.

I'd suggest doing away with the governors concept in the UI entirely.
You can have a few different options:

Best performance
Good performance
Good battery savings
Best power savings

(The middle two aren't very good; this is just an idea.)  ... and map
them to (respectively):

performance
ondemand
conservative
powersave

The 'userspace' governor is pretty much useless from the concept of a
power manager that the user can edit, unless you're going to provide
extra UI for the user to set the frequency manually, which personally I
think is a bad idea.

The more radical option (which in a way I'd prefer) would be to do away
with the ability to set the CPU governor entirely, and just set it to
'ondemand' all the time, or maybe to 'ondemand' when on battery, and
'performance' when on AC (or maybe use 'conservative' instead of
'ondemand' when on battery).  Because, really, why does the user care
about this crap?  (Of course there's the problem I've mentioned for CPUs
like mine that can't use 'ondemand' or 'conservative', but maybe there's
a way to handle that case properly too.)

	-brian