Xfce4 power manager 0.6.0 RC1 released

[Ali Abdallah]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> 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?  
I do care about this crap, since i like to have powersave governor when 
on battery, it gives me 35 minutes more instead of ondemand.

Also i can't always use conservative, i had a problem using this 
governor on an Acer machine, when using  this governor my machine was 
heating up and the cooling was very noisy.

So for that i'm going to follow the first suggestion, but for ondemand 
and conservative i have to find a good sentence describing them.
> (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.)
>
>   
I'm interested in this kind of problems, first of all let me understand 
it clearly, you can't use ondemand or conservative, but you can use the 
others right, since i want to get rid of the CPU tab in the settings 
dialog in case the CPU can't use any governor ( like an old desktop that 
i have).

Best Regards,
Ali.