When setting the time for screen blank, there are ten options. IMO, that’s to many options, and yet preferable options are missing.
Personally, I think it should be possible to choose up to at least 2 hours. But I cannot see how this setting ever could be good by having to choose between preset options. My suggestion is to have a slider instead, like it is on mouse speed.
I don’t think a slider would be a good design choice since I am assuming the slider would allow precise options (like 35 minutes witth 7 seconds) which is odd and would make it difficult for the end user.
Unless you are thinking of a, sort of, ‘sticky’ slider, where you can slide between set options, but then that would just be reinventing the current drop down menu.
If you are looking to set a custom time that is not available as an option in the GNOME control center, you can also set a custom value via dconf-editor. Just navigate to /org/gnome/desktop/session and modify the idle-delay value.
Yes, I’m aware of how I personally could set the value. I’m a fairly seasoned Linux user, and I work as a developer. My suggestion is not intended to solve a problem for me personally.
My main theory has basically been that that I find it extremely unlikely that I’m the only one who wants more than 15 minutes. I’d guess there are quite many people who wants that. And yet, in the WM that is supposed to make everything as easy as possible for a beginner, there is no way of doing it without hackery, and I count using dconf-editor or the terminal as hackery for beginners.
However, while I do work as a developer, I’m not good at designing user interfaces. Especially not if they should be geared towards beginners. You might be right that a slider is not optimal. I can only speculate.
But that I can do. I believe that a sticky slider would allow for more different values before it looks to crowded. A wild guess from me would be that you quite easily could have 20 different options. In that case, I’d suggest adding 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 90 and 120 minutes, with 2 more to spare. I believe that the amount of users who wants more that 120 minutes or don’t think any of my suggested values is precise enough is incredibly low.
My personal preference would be a number box where you can manually type what you want. Possibly linked to a slider. But I guess that would not fit the clean look Gnome seems to be aiming at, and would also only be a benefit to a very, very small user base. So it’s not worth it, unless it would be the best choice when it comes to UX design.
Well, those are my thoughts.
This is now much easier to change because of some code changes in Settings I authored. I agree with the premise that there are too many values, and with a distribution that is kind of strange.
I started a discussion on this on a MR as well:
@velsinki Nice. It’s an improvement.
However, I’d still say that the drop down list is probably not the best choice. There will either be to many options and/or crucial options missing.
So what other options are there? Those that I can think about is slider, sticky slider and text box. I’d prefer a text box, but that’s me.
In this case, I think that things have gone a bit to far with the clean looks of Gnome. Sure, I understand the reason, but in this case it simply does not fit.
Here is how it looks in KDE:
2 hours is a very long time to have the screen stay awake when you’re away from your computer. To be useful as a power saving feature without annoying the user, it only needs to keep the screen on for long enough that the user can read a page of text, or while video is playing.
I just checked how it works with a video playing in the foreground and in a minimised window (Youtube in Brave Browser). It keeps the screen awake when the video is in the foreground, and dims the screen when it’s not. So setting the timeout to be the duration of a movie seems unnecessary.
As it stands, Screen Dimming and Automatic Suspend work well together: the timeout intervals for Suspend start where the intervals for Dimming end.
What problem is being solved by extending the timeout period to 2 hours? All I can think of is that there are times when it ought to be turned off completely, for example when a laptop is being used as a jukebox, for which Gnome Music does not override the setting like a foreground video does. But rather than setting the timeout to 2 hours permanently, or opening the settings app to turn it off temporarily, would a checkbox in the notifications panel be better?
Something like this…
But someone might want to disable Automatic Suspend for the same reason they would disable Screen Dimming, so perhaps “Prevent Power Saving” would be a better label. And it might be better placed as an option in the Power Mode button in the System menu, rather than the notifications panel. I’m not sure exactly what it should look like, but I think something like this would be better than a 2-hour timeout for the screen dimming feature.
What problem is being solved by extending the timeout period to 2 hours?
I would like to ask a counter question: What problem is being solved by not allowing users to do so?
One use case for me is that I often are using two computers at the same time, but one is only for chat and email and such, so I want it to show things on screen in case someone wants to reach me, but I also don’t want to forget to lock the screen if I’m away for long.
What problem is solved by not allowing users to delay the screen dimming by 3 days? There has to be a limit, and 2 hours is sufficiently outside what I assume is the intended functionality of the feature that I don’t think it’s wrong not to publish a setting for it.
The Caffeine extension delays screensavers and auto-suspend, and its timeout options include nothing between 60 minutes and infinity, which is essentially what I suggested with the toggle in the notifications panel.
Uncommon use cases are often not catered to. I would write a script to toggle the power saver, and associate it with a keyboard shortcut.
There has to be a limit
If we disregard physical limitations of computers, this is not true. There does not have to be a limit. A text box where the user enter the number of minutes they want would remove that limit.
Imagine if you had bought a 20TB hard drive, and when you want to partition it, you have a few presets where the biggest is 10TB with the explanation that such big hard drives are rare.
Don’t get me wrong. I would totally agree with this if the program itself didn’t support larger drives for technical reasons. But when it is a simple GUI thing it becomes a different matter.
A pre-configured list of options is not just for picking a setting, it’s also to give a hint as to what the functionality is for. That’s why I noted that the auto-suspend options start where the screen dimming settings end. If lists are removed in favour of free-form user input we would have a less pleasant UI and no hints.
Partitioning a hard drive up to its own size limit is not rare; leaving a screen unattended, unlocked and at full brightness for days is, so a limit makes sense.
This topic was automatically closed 45 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
