gnome-power-manager's handling of "critically low" battery power could be more user-friendly

[Louis-Dominique Dubeau]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

I'm running Gutsy. The version of the gnome-power-manager on my system is:

2.20.0-0ubuntu6

I think gnome-power-manager is behaving as intended but I think the intended design is not user friendly. Here is what caused me to submit this bug:

1. The power meter in the notification area had turned orange for a while. The last time I hovered over the meter before my computer shut down, the meter told me that the battery power would be exhausted in 20 minutes.

2. A few seconds after my last power check, without any further warning or any way to prevent this, the laptop shut down. Note that I did not launch any kind of intensive power-consuming task between my last power check and the time the computer shut down. I understand that if I had done something which suddenly consumed more power, the previous 20min estimate would suddenly become incorrect and could perhaps cause the power manager to suddenly consider the battery level to be critical. But no such thing happened.

I checked my power settings and I think the computer behaved according to the settings I have set but there are several problems with the way gnome-power-manager behaves. I'm going to list those problems here:

1. There is no indication of what "critically low" battery power means. Is it a percentage? Is it in minutes? I checked the help and found no information there. (I searched for "critically low" in the entire Gnome documentation.)

2. What "critically low" means is probably dependent on the specific hardware being used and probably should be configurable by the user. My computer shut down while there were 20 minutes of power remaining. That's not "critically low" as far as I'm concerned.

3. There is dissonance between what the power meter in the notification area is reporting and the behavior a normal user would expect. If the power meter says there are 20 minutes of power remaining and does not say anything else, then the user is going to expect to be able to *work* for another 20 minutes. But that's not what happens. The time reported by the power meter means "you have X minutes of power remaining IF AND ONLY IF you have configured your power management settings to do nothing if the level goes critical". The reality is that if the user has configured the power manager to shut down the computer if levels go critical, then there's is less *working* time than what the meter reports.

But I submit that a normal user is interested not in theoretical values but in how much *actual* time they have before "something drastic" happens. If the user has configured their system to do nothing if the power level becomes critical then this "something drastic" is the time at which there is no power remaining in the battery. However, if the user has configured the power management to either shutdown, sleep or hibernate when the power level is critical this "something drastic" is the time at which the machine will be forcibly shutdown, put to sleep or put into hibernation by the power management system.

I think the way to fix this would be to have the meter continue to report how much power the battery has *in total* but also determine what event the user would really care about and inform the user about when that event is likely to happen. For instance, the power meter could say the following:

"The battery has 30 minutes of power remaining (10%).
Based on your power management settings and current consumption, the computer will be shutdown/put to sleep/put into hibernation in 10 minutes."

4. There is absolutely no warning that the power management system is just about to take action. You're working and then poof, the computer shuts down. Yes, the power meter becomes orange but it can be orange for 30 minutes before anything happens. This indication is not focused enough. It would be preferable if about one minute before taking action, the power management system would pop a dialog saying "This computer will be shutdown (or whatever the user chose) in 60 seconds. Click "Cancel" to continue using the computer until the power runs out." The "60 seconds" figure could be a live countdown rather than static. The user would then be able to configure power management to take care of the general case scenarios but would also be able to adapt to specific scenarios. The idea is yeah, in general I want my computer to go to sleep if it is about to run out of power and I'm not there to do something about it but if I'm about to finish a presentation and my power is running low, I'd rather cancel the default action and finish my presentation. If I'm concerned that I'll run out of power before I'm finished, I can take action.

All of what I'm pointing out and suggesting here is obviously subject to discussion and refinement.

[Andres Herrera (andresh)]

Thanks for the suggestions

[Andres Herrera (andresh)]

I've this upstream at: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517900

[Endolith (endolith)]

My Dell Inspiron 8600 just goes black without any warning at all and I lose all my work. Quite frustrating, as you can imagine. It just happened and I'm restraining my anger.

I have my Power Management settings to "Suspend" for critically low battery, but, of course, it does nothing. No warning. No suspend. Just goes black.

[pinguino (pcboard)]

I can confirm this bug. Without warning the computer shut down. It should get a message 2 minutes or something like that before the laptop shut down.
Do you need some data. Please tell me, what logs do you need.
Thanks.

pinguino

[gunnar-eee (gunnar2)]

Yes please prioritize this. It is probably one of the major flaws of Ubuntu 8.04
A power alert warning is of critical importance for a laptop user (a laptop being the only computer category where battery power is relavant anyway),

[Jim Rorie (jfrorie)]

I don't think this is a feature request. This is a bug. I'm looking at the Gnome Power Manager manual it is not performing as shown.

I looked upstream and am not seeing any requests for logs. There is an upstream bug identical to this that's over a year old.

I'm not sure the usefulness of the power manager if it can't report the battery state. What do we need to do to get some movement on this?

[pruch (diogo-pruch)]

I'm using ubuntu 8.10 and I did this to solve the problem:

On Configuration Editor (gconf-editor)
I've set the followed keys:
/apps/gnome-power-manager/general/use_time_for_policy (false)
/apps/gnome-power-manager/thresholds/percentage_low (15)
/apps/gnome-power-manager/thresholds/percentage_critical (12)
/apps/gnome-power-manager/thresholds/percentage_action (10)
/apps/gnome-power-manager/actions/critical_battery (hibernate)

This means that when my battery reaches 15% GPM will show a "low battery warning", at 12% it will show a "Critical battery warning" and at 10% it will put my system to hibernate. I have a li-ion battery and use 10% to prevent damage to it.

I think that there should be a way to set these values directly on GPM, not just via gconf-editor

[farchumbre (farchumbre)]

hi,
i have the same problem, but the changes you suggested didn't solve the problem
i am using ubuntu 9.04
thanks

[X181 (olag-2)]

Ubuntu 11.10

The power-settings-ui is unusable. i miss also a lot of options. As an example: no action on critical low battery is not configurable. This option is very important to users with a broken battery. gconf-editor is not a solution for daily things.