Comment 21 for bug 355300
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| Henrique de Moraes Holschuh (hmh) wrote | #21 |
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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
Just to get one point clear and across.
The problem is not how the ThinkPad works (because you cannot change it, and it works just like that in Windows anyway).
It is that the O.S. is failing utterly to convey information to the users in a way that lets them gently (or not) correct their expectations of how the volume keys operate to match the reality of the ThinkPad they're working with.
Fix that. Stop trying to make things horribly complicated (and always subtly incorrect) trying to force the hardware to be something it isn't, and to do something it is not prepared to do.
There are a number of ways of getting an idea across to the users, and IBM must have found one of them, because the volume keys were not on the top list of complains (it was not even in the list AFAIK) of the *millions* of Windows ThinkPad users from the model 600 up to the T43 and first-gen T60 and Z60.
The behavior of the volume changes only changed in Windows for users of the T60 second gen, X61 and Z61. I should know, I got the reports. Before that, it has always been that it would **NOT** touch the main mixer at all.
And all the Windows users had was a simple OSD green bar for volume and muting, and a "quick tour" guide (which I frankly don't recall if it mentioned the volume buttons or not).
If giving the users a supplementary ALSA mixer that they will see changing when they press the keys will be enough, consider it done. If the problem is OSD for that ALSA mixer, see #357673.
If all of that is not enough, it is up to you guys to enhance the desktop environment to do even more hand-holding on this issue and tell the user about the volume keys and how they work outright.