SUMMARY Suppose a user wants to disable automatic functions that happen after X amount of time of inactivity. They will find the Energy Saving page with settings for Screen Dimming, Switching-off screen and Suspend. They will think that is the place to control everything that has to do with inactivity... only for their system to still lock up after a while. Not only that, but they will probably think that changing the options in Energy Saving isn't doing anything at all, and it's bugged. It will take a while to occur to them that there is a setting all the way in Desktop Behavior that controls it. This happened to me and I couldn't figure out why for more time than I'd like to admit. I've also seen other users in social media explaining they didn't understand why changing the settings in Energy Saving didn't change the time it took for their screen to lock. If a user first finds the Energy Saving page, they will think there's no other place that controls inactivity stuff. Ideally, everything would be moved to a single place: Energy Saving. But if it can't be moved, a shortcut should be in Energy Savings that points to Screen Locking, and vice-versa. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20211021 KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.87.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2
Screen locking doesn't have anything to do with energy saving, though. So this would be quite unintuitive and misleading. I can appreciate that the current location isn't ideal, but the proposal would be even worse. There is a long-term effort to come up with a better organization for the pages in System Settings, but we are still in the design phase and nothing has been decided yet.
Until a proper redesign is done, I urge the devs to consider putting a shortcut button linking those pages together I NOW understand that locking=/=energy saving. However, imagine you are a user trying to disable automatic behavior related to inactivity, after looking around system settings, you find the Energy Saving page which has three different options(one of them can be used to lock the screen). It isn't unreasonable to assume those are all the options KDE has, only for the system to still lock itself up automatically and the user to scratch their heads trying to understand what is happening. This happened to me, I was under the impression the Energy Saving settings were broken, and the system was trying to suspend, but couldn't for whatever reason.
I'm confused about the source of the confusion, though. You said: > you find the Energy Saving page which has three different options(one of them can be used to lock the screen) Where did you find this? What specifically are you referring to?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #3) > I'm confused about the source of the confusion, though. You said: > > > you find the Energy Saving page which has three different options(one of them can be used to lock the screen) > Where did you find this? What specifically are you referring to? Beware I'm not using KDE in English. The Energy Saving page has 3 different options related to inactivity: 1st: Screen Dimming after X minutes 2nd: Switch off screen after Y minutes 3rd: Suspend Session: Automatically >Do Thing< after Z minutes The 3rd option, despite being called "Suspend Session", has a little dropdown menu with "Suspend, Hibernate, Hybrid Sleep, Shutdown and Lock Screen" as options, apparently you can use it to lock rather than suspend. Again, a user that doesn't know there's a Lock Screen page under Desktop Behavior will look at the Energy Saving Page, see it has a bunch of options (including locking the screen) related to inactivity, and will be confused for a while why their system keep getting locked.
*** Bug 452970 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***