Bug#467264: g-p-man: 'on battery' config interacts with 'on AC' settings - severity broken

[Eddy Petrișor]

Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> severity 467264 normal

I'd keep this to important, the least - will explain below.

> thanks

> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:31:24AM +0300, Eddy Petri??or wrote:
>>>>>  looking at power preferences for AC and I set it to 100%. To my  surprise,
>>>>> the brightness changed.
>> This is again visible on this  Asus laptop (not the same as the
>> initial laptop for which I reported). Still, the slider now works in
>> the right direction.
>>

>>>>> While on battery:
>>>>> - moving the AC slider changes brightness
>>> no longer happens
>> Now it does.
>>

>>> There isn't anymore a battery slider?!!??!? WTF?
>>> Is this a GNOME usability "improvement"?
>> This is still broken.
> 
> What gnome-power-manager does these days is that you configure the AC
> brightness and you can indicate whether or not to dimm in battery mode. So when

This is broken, since on battery mode, on that ASUS the dimming was taken to the half of the 
brightness level, and there's no control on the default brightness level on battery.

The laptop lost about 20-30 minutes of battery life just because I (the user) NO LONGER have the 
possibility to control the default brightness level. If I could have done this, I would have chosen 
the minimum brightness level, BUT, NO, GNOME guys think they are able to choose for me.

> you change the AC setting it's normal although confusing that the display
> brightness changes as a result of that.

That is brain dead. AC settings shouldn't have to do *ANYTHING* with battery ones. And there is a 
good reason for that: I don't want those two profiles to interfere with each other.

I can even give myself as a real example where you'd want the battery brightness default to be 
brighter than the AC setting:
- at home, sometimes my eyes get tired and I prefer the brightness to turn down a notch or two, to 
ease on my eyes
- I often comute by train, but at the hour I comute, usually the sun is close to the horizon (either 
morning, or close to sun set), so I usually use the brightest level when on battery, since I am 
usually in that situation, when that happens.


There's even more reason to bring back the battery slider (when using "Dim display when idle"): when 
the laptop remains idle for a while, it "dimms down" to the "automatically computed best level", 
which usually means that it will actually bring the brightness up, or mess up with the level that 
was ajusted by the user manually, from the keyboard.  This is also *very* wrong (if English allows 
such and expression).

> I've downgraded the severity of this bug to normal. I guess we should rename

I don't agree with the severity downgrade, because of the regressions explained...

> and forward this as UI confusing issue to upstream, do you agree? As in the

... and, no, this is definetly NOT a UI issue, but a functionalty issue.
Battery and AC brightness levels shouldn't be connected in *ANY* way.

> backend does what it should to, it's just not very clear for an enduser :)

But, I agree, this is an upstream issue.

-- 
Regards,
EddyP
=============================================
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein