Suspend & Power Off: A compromise

[Denis Washington <denisw online de>]

Hi,

The question if there should be an always-visible "Power Off..." status 
menu item next to "Suspend" has been discussed to death already. 
However, I do not want to bring up that same exact discussion again, but 
propose a compromise solution, which I already mentioned in the bug 
report yesterday [1], but for those who don't follow that bug, here is 
the idea:

There would still be only the "Suspend" option in the status menu. 
However, if the user has no application windows open (or if the dash 
shows no applications running anymore, I don't know if this is the 
same), clicking on "Suspend" would bring up a dialog which asks if the 
user would like to shut down the computer completely instead, explaining 
shortly that he would lose no state (because no application is open) and 
that he would save more power this way. Closing the laptop lid would 
obviously still always suspend.

The advantage of this solution is that the original intention of the 
current design would be preserved - application state is never lost - 
while making it easy for the user to save power if there is no state to 
lose. If he or she doesn't like or want complete shutdown (because of 
the boot time on next usage, or because he/she knows there is a 
background process running that should be resumed next time) there is 
still the option to suspend anyway.

What do you think?

Regards,
Denis

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643457