Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 3, 2011 11:43 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by amaranth
Parent article: Quotes of the week

That is equally stupid, I often want my laptop to suspend when I close the lid. Why not let me choose the conditions so it is predicable and works how I want it? My laptop has no multimedia keys so turning off the music first takes some effort - and when I close the lid of my laptop, I often do it for a good reason - to QUICKLY suspend-to-ram because I'm interrupted by someone talking to me or something like that! This would make me have to tell them to shut up so I can figure out how to stop my music player THEN close the laptop lid...

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Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 3, 2011 14:55 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

No, it's only a problem if your musicplayer DOES inhibit suspend. I don't want it to - I want my computer to act predictable and how I want it... So when I configured it to suspend when I close the lid, it should suspend. If I don't want it to do that I'll put it in a power management scheme which won't suspend the lid if I close it. I don't want apps meddling with that. Sure, a app should suspend screensaver or suspend when I am watching a video - but when I close the lid, the darn thing should OBVIOUSLY go into suspend...

The whole idea of building heuristics (which will always fail in many situations) for this is stupid, sorry. Good defaults - of course. Trying to out-smart the user in a way that will never fully work and then not allowing the user to fix it - braindead.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 6, 2011 23:15 UTC (Sun) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

Yea, freeking fantastic there. So you've turned the volume (almost) all the way down. A half hour later you toss your laptop into your bag, expecting it to suspend because thats what it always does, latter you open your bag to find that your laptop has become a wad of melted plastic.

Gnome needs to fire all its usability people because they don't seem to understand this simple relationship:

"Always exactly the behavior I wanted" is better than "deterministic but not always what I want" which is better than "sometimes not the behavior I wanted and not deterministic".

One beautiful thing about computers is that they can be pretty deterministic. If something is not always right, but at least consistent we can work around its idiocy. If it's not deterministic then we have to constantly check that it's not screwing us over.

It is usually not a usability improvement to make the machine right a little more often but far less deterministic. A laptop that always suspends on lid closed or never suspends on lid close is not a fire-hazard. Making that depend on an external monitor being connected is probably safe as long as the detection is _very_ reliable (and consistently wrong when its not reliable). Checking to see if a music player is running? I think thats going to ruin a lot of hardware.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 10, 2011 10:46 UTC (Thu) by __alex (subscriber, #38036) [Link]

I didn't say "if your music player inhibited suspend" I said "if your music allowed you to inhibit suspend." The implication is of course that there would be a checkbox in preferences that would let you manage the behavior.

Generally laptops have thermal cutouts so I'm not sure what this firehazard stuff is a bit silly.

I would prefer to have customizable (yes hahaha this is Gnome, they don't do customizable) automatic suspend behavior over having to manually suspend it myself or having it automatically suspend whenever I close the lid.

Perhaps some sort of global "inhibit suspend" option in the power management applet would accomplish this in a more obvious way than making it a per-app configurable.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 3, 2011 18:25 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

You know, the GUI necessary to make it possible to create both your desired configuration and the default policy is way beyond GTK's dynamic form capabilities. Since you've got specific desires that you can explain in detail, you'll surely do better with gconf than any possible dialog box. The best configuration system, in my opinion, is to give the user the choice of a few provided policies (for people who don't want to think about configuring this particular aspect) plus the ability to use a user-generated policy (for people who want to come up with one). Madness lies in trying to provide users who think through their policies with a simple choice of the policy they'd come up with.

Your laptop doesn't have any multimedia keys? All of the computers I've bought have at least had a Pause/Break key. Of course, it took a certain amount of cleverness to get it to actually control anything.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 3, 2011 20:41 UTC (Thu) by jmitchel (guest, #11611) [Link]

Sure... gconf. When I was young and never left the house, I could be bothered to figure out what random incantations I needed to make things work, or just ignore the problems. Back then I had Linux on everything. Now I just want my computers to work, for features I counted on last year to stay where I found them, etc...

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 3, 2011 21:27 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

If you want nothing to ever change, then just never upgrade anything. I know someone who is still running RH6 on a 10-year-old machine for just that reason. :)

On MacOSX there is almost a whole industry devoted to making fancy GUIs to expose hidden preferences only available from command-line options. That seems like a pretty sensible way to do things: keep the default GUI simple, and if someone wants some advanced feature, let them either use the commandline or download an advanced-gui to do it for them.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 4, 2011 5:32 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Well I still prefer if developers try to build a GUI that can do both. Sure, it's more work, sure it is harder - but if you succeed you got really a superior product. Some applications manage to do this - a great example is gwenview 4.x, which is 1000 times simpler than its 3.x version but has actually MORE features. It's possible ;-)

Something like GConf is just an abomination, imho. KDE has something like that kconfigeditor I believe - blegh. I must say I like recent ideas to build in search in configuration interfaces, let them be build dynamically etc - that might be very helpful.

Finally, why install a separate app or tool if you could have an advanced button in a normal gui hiding the complexity but having it available for those who need it?

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 4, 2011 11:49 UTC (Fri) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link]

Something like GConf is just an abomination, imho. KDE has something like that kconfigeditor I believe - blegh. I must say I like recent ideas to build in search in configuration interfaces, let them be build dynamically etc - that might be very helpful.

Have you used gconf-editor recently? I find it's a decently discoverable GUI for so-called "hidden" preferences. Unlike Windows RegEdit it even explains what every switch does and which possible values it has. IMHO this is equivalent of having an "Advanced" button in every GUI. They are just all kept in a central place.

Of course I don't know whether the old gconf-editor will be ported to the new dconf world. But I suppose it will get written if there is a demand.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 4, 2011 12:39 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

dconf-editor already exists.

Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 4, 2011 13:21 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I wonder why anyone would create a KDE application which starts with a g. ;-)