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.