• koorogi@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    For a phone I’m are more likely than not to have with me, I could understand. But for a laptop, and especially for a desktop, if the machine is asleep, I’m not at it. Why is it great for a computer I don’t have with me to show me as online in discord or slack?

    • abhibeckert@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It shouldn’t show you as online in discord/slack, but it should be downloading messages/etc so that when you do come online you don’t have to wait for it to sync with all your cloud services.

      Also - consider those cloud services might not necessarily be available when you come online — maybe you open your laptop on an airplane and don’t want to pay for a satellite connection. When things are working well a modern operating system with modern services and background processing will have downloaded everything while it was “sleeping”.

      • koorogi@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I’m not knocking the idea of running various maintenance tasks while the computer is asleep. The original post mentioned installing updates, and I agree that and your ideas make a lot of sense. It’s not even a very new idea — I seem to remember the Wii would download updates using its ARM processor while the console was asleep.

        OP specifically mentioned “discord or slack showing [them] online”, and that’s the use case I was questioning.

        I do think that, even for legitimately useful uses, I’d still want the ability to turn it off. No matter how low the power draw, there may be times when I need to stretch my battery life a little longer, and I’m in a better position to know and plan for that than the OS is.

    • averyminya@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      We have all kind of things that can run in the background, if they can continue to run but on exponentially lower power, why not?

      • koorogi@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Sure, there are things that make sense to do in the background. The example of installing updates was a good one. But I was asking specifically about the example that was given of making you appear online on a chat service, because I just can’t see the use case for that.

        • averyminya@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Oh my mistake lol, some people are just social and being seen as present is important to them. I’m not one of them but I know a number of people who are - a few years younger than I which I’ve wondered if growing up more linked to socials attributes to that mindset.

          People in my group use these tricks for work chats to at least look active if they’re not. For friends? I don’t think I’d care lol.