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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

People are posting all sorts of code one-liners to do this, but... what happened to just pressing the power button?

Pros:

  * Only 1 keypress per display
  * The button is guaranteed to be present on all displays by default
  * It doesn't frustrate you by pointing out the dead pixels
  * Optimal energy efficiency
  * You don't have to customize scripts or settings on your OSs, even if you reinstall
  * You don't have to know if you've got an OLED that turns off the hardware pixels when they're black, or LCD that turns off its backlight, or whatever a CRT display used to do
  * You don't have to worry about a working Internet connection to access the site
  * You don't need a browser
  * You don't even need a CPU

Cons:

  * The off color is not customizable

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> Only 1 keypress per display

Nope, two on my right hand monitor

> The button is guaranteed to be present on all displays by default

Nope, no button at all on the left

> You don't have to customize scripts or settings on your OSs, even if you reinstall

reinstall? What is this 1998? If I did have a new computer then when I restore my essential home directory (~/bin, ~/.vimrc etc) any script would be in there

> Nope, two on my right hand monitor

That UX seems completely unnecessary

> Nope, no button at all on the left

Buttons are nice. You can press them. You can feel them. You can see them.

> reinstall? What is this 1998?

Believe it or not, in 2021, if you've missed the window to do a dist-upgrade before Ubuntu EOLs the release (which is much quicker on non-LTS), there's no easy way to upgrade the distro - the recommended option is to reinstall.

> any script would be in there

What about on Windows? Now you've got different repos for different OSs, which you manage. Any script you write needs to be maintained. The button is universal. No extra effort needed. No maintenance.

You press the button and the monitor shuts off. It's the perfect UX.

I'd do-release-upgraded many 1404 machines after it went EOL

I don't know about Windows, nor care about it, I don't use it. I may have many OSes that I do use, but I only have one on my desktop with a monitor plugged in, and it's been the broadly the same for 21 years (debian, then ubuntu)

Yes the buttons on the monitors are rubbish, they're also what there is. My TV which has my monitoring screen and music on is controlled from a remote control, one button to mute, one to turn it off completely. If I didn't have the remote though, the button would be awful (it's on the back, and again is a multi stage menu system to turn off)

> The button is guaranteed to be present on all displays by default

Mine doesn't have one, it does have a touch activated area that's not findable by touch because it's completely smooth.

Please take the time to spray the monitor with gasoline and light it on fire. There's no need to accept such terrible UX. The power button has been the perfect UX since the invention of power buttons.

Cons:

  * power button is some gimmick optico fingerprint reading crap that is somehow less user-friendly than a light switch for 10 cents
  * turning the monitor back on will take 3-15 seconds, and due to above you may end up waiting 20 seconds to discover you didn't activate the button properly, depending on the monitor

by all means, I don't intend to defend using a web browser to set the color of pixels

It's true. Under MacOS, one of my displays flickers 3 times when I turn it on, the other one twice. Somewhere along the way, we made a wrong turn.

Before my current Chromebook, which allows fully turning off the display, I had a bookmark to a black image so that I could use my Chromebook at night for listening to comedy, etc while falling asleep. Making a black image fullscreen would almost make it so that the display wasn't giving off light.

I have a multi-monitor setup. I have three monitors, acquired over the years, of different manufacturers and sizes, and all have buttons on the bottom or back of the frame. I have to hit the buttons by feel. Usually it’s to switch inputs, but I think it’d be just as annoying to constantly turn them on and off via button.

The pursuit of aesthetics, in this case, is at the expense of usability.

Maybe if you have a download or some other long-running process that you don't want to interrupt? What I think would be useful is some way to manually use DPMS to actually power off the display. The only thing I'm aware of is using xset on Linux / X11.

I'm old enough to remember screensavers, but surely people would lock their screen for this situation rather than just load a webpage (cmd-ctrl-q on a mac apparently, and windows-L used to do it back in the 2000 days, I assume it still does it on windows)

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