Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

While we may disagree on the "user-hostility" idea, I think you're definitely right that
people need to be informed about potential problems like this no matter whose fault it really
is.

Actually, I would say that's a general problem. As a community we have lots of resources to
find out about the problems and do our own sifting for solutions, but it seems like this
process is sometimes unnecessary. In this case for this bug, there's actually a metric for
when the distro can guess that something is going wrong (e.g., check every hour to see if the
spin count is increasing at an inappropriately high rate).

Unfortunately, there aren't that many tools to get this sort of information, at least not for
a desktop distribution. I think it would be interesting to see an interface along the lines of
Fedora's SELinux Troubleshooter for things like this. Maybe every hour a cron job starts up to
check for common errors with metrics like this. If there is one, an icon displays in the task
bar to tell you about it and point you towards some proposed fixes with all the requisite
warnings about changing your hardware defaults?