Idle-suspend a little too intrusive to user experience?

[Daniel Drake]

Laptops have not yet been handed out here in La Rioja, but a few have
been handed around to various parts of the MinEd and support staff, so
we're already seeing some bug reports and user experiences rolling in.

The idle-suspend experience has been causing some discomfort.
Specifically 4 cases:

1. The machine suspended while playing a video in Jukebox (probably
not a common case, but it happened, and I had to explain this system,
and it's not something that's very easy to explain to non-techies!)

2. The machine suspends frequently while it is loading a web page, and
does not wake up, meaning that the web page doesn't finish loading
until you realise what's happened and intervene

3. After a lid-suspend, the machine frequently sleeps before it has
scanned or reconnected for wireless networks. The user sits there
waiting and waiting for the network to appear again, and it's not
going to appear until they realise what's happened and intervene.
(related #9854, but I feel that this is a more general problem)

4. Sometimes a stale version of the screen is loaded as the machine
goes into suspend - generally the screen that was locked upon the
previous suspend. This is really confusing for the user. (#9664)


As a result of these early issues, the team here wanted to increase
the idle suspend timeout from 15 seconds to 15 minutes. I managed to
persuade them not to do this until we've actually seen how it holds up
in the hands of actual users (children) but in the mean time they will
be increasing that timeout to 60 seconds in order to soften the blow.

Daniel