Comment 22 for bug 456637

The people who claim only some people are affected by this bug are completely off base. This is a bug that affects everyone. It is ridiculous that the setting for the nvidia powermizer is not saved when you change it unless you do so by manually editing xorg.conf. It's also pretty annoying that it defaults to the lowest performance setting even on a desktop. On my system this results in what is a pretty decent nvidia card using performance that would have been considered weak something like 10 years ago. I'm talking about clocks going down to 1/12 speed.
And it should not affect desktop performance, but it does. It especially seems to affect video. And like pretty much all "adaptive" cpu technologies to date it is not very adaptive in that it does not change performance levels quickly enough if at all. I read something online that suggested that powermizer waits 15 seconds after detecting a performance change to change performance.
There are settings available to make powermizer default to a different performance mode and even set it to be smart enough to use a different setting when on ac power versus battery power. Of course right now the change in performance mode is not saved when done through the gui and there is no gui way to change the other stuff, but the capability exists. There's really no excuse for this bug having persisted for years without relief.
The problem I see with editing xorg.conf manually, besides the fact there is a lot of misinformation and bad instructions out there for how to set powermizer therein which have led people to a bad pass at times and besides the aforementioned problem that this is a high bar for the target Ubuntu user, is that what you put in there is likely to get blown away unless there is some awareness in the tools involved and installers that also edit xorg.conf on a regular basis.
All that aside, quite apart from the fact that EVERYONE will suffer from bad performance and settings not being saved, there are clearly a significant set of cards, etc, that actually have flickering and freezing problems from powermizer. That would be solved if it defaulted to off and could be changed later somehow. In any case, absent that it will be difficult for most people to fix once they are in that state where they can't even see or log in, and I would imagine there are not many who would even figure out that powermizer was the problem in the first place.
The nvidia-settings app is nvidia's, as is powermizer itself, so I see some of the passing of the buck there. However, there's no reason we can't do something about xorg.conf within Ubuntu.