Re: Splitting logout options

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2002-03-15 at 13:13, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> arvind <arvind samptur wipro com> writes:
> 
> > In the  Gnome2 panel, under Actions menu, we have Logout
> > option which pops up a dialog with logout, reboot and shutdown
> > options.
> > 
> > As part of bug #70710,  those 3 options should be moved under
> > Actions menu itself. The call, the client(panel) makes to the session
> > manager is through SmcRequestSaveYourself. We need to pass the
> > type of action selected i.e logout or reboot or shutdown to the session
> > manager.  Currenlty we cannot pass the selected action type  with
> > SmcRequestYourself.
> > 
> > Any suggestions to pass this information to Session Manager would
> > be of great help.
> > 
> > Please Refer: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70710x
> 
> Well, the right way to do this is to simply to copy the current 
> dialog and make two versions:
>  
>  - One that only gives you the option to logout
>  - One that only gives you the option to reboot or shutdown.
> 
> I actually think that this is a fairly bad idea UI-wise because it clutters
> the root menu, and makes it harder to get to the items above it. I can't
> really see the advantages of having separate items, unless we think people
> aren't going to figure out that to turn off your computer you have to
> first log out.
> 
> (It also obscures the fact that you are logging and then then rebooting or 
> turning off the computer and all the normal logout stuff takes place.)

Presumably this stuff appears in the menus primarily for single-user
style machines, not public workstations. On public workstations I would
hope that restart/shutdown are not handed to users. On systems where
people are commonly turning the machine off at the end of the day, and
its basically a single user machine, there's no point in making them
choose to "log out" before they can shut down. 

The user wants to "shut down". I think its fairly obvious to them that
they will be logged out when they shut down the machine. On the other
hand, I don't think its obvious that they will have to start a log out
in order to shut the machine off. That's not the objective they have in
mind, its just a side effect.

The menu in question is in no danger of being cluttered (at least, not
at the moment). Clutter is bad when it makes things hard to find. In
this case, I think restart and shut down are easier to find when they
aren't obscured behind "log out".

The restart and shut down options really shouldn't be connected to each
other. I think its a lot cleaner to have three seperate dialogues. In
the star trek future I hope session management is good enough in GNOME
that this doesn't even need to be a confirmed operation, at least not
logging out. So if you select "log out" it just logs out, no fuss no
bother. You log back in, and the same windows and documents are open,
scrolled to the same place, with the same window on top, and the same
word highlighted. (*That* is when session management is actually useful
and more than just technically cool)

-Seth