Much hot air over blinking cursors

Posted Feb 8, 2009 22:48 UTC (Sun) by dimi (subscriber, #2732)
In reply to: Much hot air over blinking cursors by PaulWay
Parent article: Much hot air over blinking cursors

> Oh, good. Then you know that most Linux installs these days have six
> text screens sitting in virtual space, waking up twice a second to turn
> their unseen cursor on and off.

Of course I am aware. I have addressed this problem in my first post:
A cursor blinks only in a windows that has the following properties:
- it has focus
- it's waiting for keyboard input

Moreover, only _one_ windows at a time has focus.

This is trivial to test -- just put your six terminals side-by-side.

So your entire argument is based on a false premise. Considering this,
now you can see that the 2W savings can happen only when:
- the focus is on a window that has an editor
(not that common in a typical session)
- the computer is totally idle, like the mouse is not moving,
not playing music or video, etc
- the screensaver hasn't kicked in

How often does that happen?

Continuing claiming the 2W saving is like saying we save in fact 20W because there is a spike of 20W every few seconds. It's ridiculous.

Dimi.

Much hot air over blinking cursors

Posted Feb 8, 2009 23:36 UTC (Sun) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (3 responses)

I think he's referring to the six real consoles, not xterms.

Much hot air over blinking cursors

Posted Feb 8, 2009 23:42 UTC (Sun) by dimi (subscriber, #2732) [Link] (2 responses)

That's a complete non-issue. The population of users that use only real consoles (no X) is too small for words. Besides, those are the ultra-technical users that are more than capable to change that setting themselves.

BTW, I'm not even sure if the change under discussion here applies to real consoles...

Much hot air over blinking cursors

Posted Feb 9, 2009 0:46 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

You don't get it. Those six text consoles are there for almost everyone,
including non-technical users, but *even though they're not visible* and
are on different virtual consoles, they *still* wake up the video card
twice a second to blink their invisible cursors on and off.

Much hot air over blinking cursors

Posted Feb 9, 2009 1:11 UTC (Mon) by dimi (subscriber, #2732) [Link]

This claim seems rather dubious -- do you have any reference to support it?

Nevertheless, *nobody* argued against a patch to fix this brain-dead behaviour. Obviously there would be no point in blinking a cursor on a hidden console...

The entire discussion was about turning off blinking on the regular cursor used in X, something that users are used to for a long time.