Shutdown and restart

[Denis Washington <denisw online de>]

Hi,

After a long time of suspicion I finally tried GNOME Shell and must say 
I really like what I see! However, there are still some gripes that I 
have. I would like to address one particularly in this post: the shell's 
offered shutdown options.

Currently, it seems that the shell only offers "Suspend", with "Power 
Off..." appearing when you hold down the Alt key. I find this to be 
problematic for several reasons:

1. Suspending, while often practical, still drains power. Making it 
appear as the sole shutdown action thus contributes to it being used 
where a complete shutdown would have sufficed, wasting power and - more 
importantly - ultimately hurting the environment (the "standby" 
phenomena). This is especially true for desktops.

2. Directly related to the first point: the complete shutdown option is 
completely undiscoverable by those who don't already know how to find 
it, that is, those who have read the relevant GNOME developer blog posts 
which mention it (which typical users don't do) or reading it in the 
documentation (which typical users don't do). Even worse, many not so 
computer-savyy users won't even know that something like a "complete 
shutdown" even exists - there is only "Suspend" in the menu, after all - 
which leads us directly back to (1).

3. Less important, but still quite bothering is the lack of an option to 
restart the computer - even a hidden one. As the reality of Linux home 
usage today is that of a multi-boot system, this seems like an important 
omission. While the system can still be graphically rebooted by logging 
out and then using the login manager to reboot, this seems like a 
relatively tedious procedure for such a fairly common use case.

Because of this, I propose the following changes:

* Add a separate, always-visible "Shut Down..." button below "Suspend"
* Add "Restart" as an option to the shutdown dialog

This would have only minimal impact on the system menu's cleanness, 
while substantially increasing the awareness and accessibility of a 
complete shutdown option (thus helping to save power) and better 
aligning to today's multi-boot reality.

Best Regards,
Denis Washington

P.S.: While I am criticising this particular design discussion, I would 
really like to let you know that I am impressed by the GNOME Shell and 
the great work you have done to design and polish it - it comes together 
nicely! Thank you for that! :)