Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Has The Linux Desktop Become Too Popular" video.

This is the actual reason for the regulation. Unlike the us, the EU recognises that climate change is a thing, and that most power is currently generated from fossil fuels. The best way and the cheapest is to not waste the power in the first place. Using a TV as an example, cheap tvs used to just turn off the tube when you put it on standby, wheras expensive ones did it properly, leaving just the remote control unit turned on, so it could turn the TV back on. The difference in power usage could sometimes be as high as 80% of the peak usage when using the TV, which is a lot of wasted power you have to generate. The same types of mistake were made with multiple generations of devices, including satellite TV boxes, fridges, home automation tech, etc, and to fix this they made this series of regulations basically saying that when you don't need to be wasting power, you should not do it if you do not need to. The issue with the kde and gnome suspend flag seems to come from conflating 2 different use cases under the same flag. The first case is the one relating to power usage and sleep, hibernate and power off. The default should be to reduce power usage when it is not needed, but is currently used as a flag to turn autosuspend on and off. The second use case is where no matter what you are doing, you need to force power off due to running low on battery power. This applies both to laptops and to any desktop or server running with a decent ups, and gradually degrading functionality can extend the time needed until forced shutdown is needed. An example would be to disable windows whole drive indexing on battery power, thus extending battery life. This second use case should have the default be forced shutdown for laptops and for desktops and servers on battery power, and is irrelevant to both on mains power. By conflating the 2 different use cases, you just end up with the currently broken understanding of what the flag should do, and the related arguments about the defaults.
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@Pentium100MHz if your car is relatively modern, it it is already computerised. The engine has a computer managing it, and most after market and a lot of built in entertainment systems run on android based embedded computers. As to your set top box shutting down during recordings, the word for that is broken. It should wake up when the recording is due to start, and stay awake during the recording, because it is doing something. However a lot of people here in the UK leave their tvs on in multiple rooms even when there is nobody there, or when they go out, and if the prompt comes up asking to verify you want to keep the TV on is not responded to, it goes into standby.
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An example of the difference would be to keep the screen turned on when playing a movie, but turning it off if doing computation or drive indexing without the need for a display. This lets the monitor go into standby, and also stops the graphics card from burning energy it does not need to use. Screensavers used to be about avoiding screen burn on tube based displays, but are now either about inactivity wallpaper or power saving depending on your option settings. Similarly, cpus have different power levels, depending on what level of usage is needed. You can step those levels down if you are barely doing anything, stepping things back up if you start a cpu intensive task. This means you could walk away from the computer when it started to do a task which was a cpu hog, but did not need the screen, and after a wait, it would blank the screen and let the monitor go into standby, and then when the task finishes, it can move the processor into a lower power mode. When you come back and move the mouse, it can turn the screen back on, waking up the monitor, and you can check if it is finished. You could even have it automatically power off when it is done.
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@Pentium100MHz we have this rule because EU citizens care about climate change, but have not yet got the mindset of actively looking at power usage, and if things are actually required to be using the levels they are now. There is also the issue that people on low incomes have to buy the cheap tech, where the search for sensible defaults has not been done, and are thus a lot more wasteful. As an example a free view box last time I looked could be bought for £15 or £40, with the more expensive one using 20% of the power in standby mode, which is often triggered by default after a few hours in the EU. The only way to force manufacturers to get a clue was to introduce these regulations and make these considerations mandatory. Similar regulations for emissions is why EU cars use half the fuel of American ones.
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@audiolatroushearetic1822 as famously noted, common sense is not that common, especially if someone else is paying the bill.
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