http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/5055/
usage cases.
Bob has decided to update his amarok colection/update his system/install a large program/compile a large program/backup his system, as this is going to take some time on his old system, he switches to Firefox to waste some time.

*obviously some users wont want this so it should be easy to disable
**for bonus points do clever stuff with the processes that the window is relying on.

this would fit in nicely with http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4121/, but be even more useful

[21 votes] Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #5055


]]> en-us Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:11:33 +0000 Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 QAPoll module http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5055/ I think it needs to be investigated...]]> Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:46:30 +0000
I think using sane nice values for processes in the first place is a better overall approach. Amarok should update at a low priority, for example.

Also, in your example, IO is as likely as anything else to be the limiting factor in most of those activities. Should we give higher IO priority to foreground apps?]]> Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:24:46 +0000
The point of this idea is that the focus gets the priority, since that is a sensible way of determining what the user's priority is. Assigning sensible defaults is of course important, but every application can have a for scenario and an against sceario. For example, daily cron jobs would seem like a good candidate for having low priority, but the other night I had to wait until the APT commands run by cron had finished before I could install any packages and thus carry on with the development I was doing which required those packages.]]> Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:27:07 +0000