Xfce Forum

dtd

Member

Registered: 2011-12-08

Posts: 74

Power Manager and other thoughts from a BSD guy

I did some reading of posts and a lot of who uses what before deciding to post this here. First why: I've installed 4.16 on four systems 2 desktops (Dell) and two laptops (Lenovo and HP). Suspend/resume has always been problematic on FreeBSD so all I want from the power manager is to turn off the screen after a while. It can do this only on the HP. On the Dells and Lenovo it produces a lots of errors of the nature illegal this and/or unrecognized that. I've post this some in detail elsewhere and they are not the point of my comments here.

Before 4.16 all the major desktops were and are Linux-centric. Nothing new to BSDers and not really an issue. After poking around it would seem the power manager and mostly likely the screen-saver (which works on non of my systems BTW) work on Linux because of systemd integration. It seems likely that most if not all of the power manager functions could be accomplished using xset. For my purposes three commands do it:
    xset dpms 300 600 900
    xset s on
    xset s 300 300

We know why I care. Why should anyone else is the question. According to what I can find about 1.2% of users use something other than windows, chrome or mac. If you assume maybe 1/5 of the 8 billion people have computers that still is a pretty large number of us. The only way to expand is to make things easier on newcomers. Windows is making our case by, well, still being "gatesonian" I have windows installed on the HP, a tiny system by today's standards; unusable. Xfce runs as well there as on any of my bigger faster screens. Xfce is my desktop for a number of reasons. As a non Linux guy I would be happier if systemd (whatever that is) was only used where required. I see no reason X11 and Xfce should fight over power management which likely is the reason for all the initialization errors which largely vanished when I deleted the screen-saver and turned of power management as much as the settings would allow.