Re: Suspend & Power Off: A compromise

[Denis Washington <denisw online de>]

Am 20.08.2011 12:41, schrieb Giovanni Campagna:
> Il giorno sab, 20/08/2011 alle 09.05 +0200, Denis Washington ha scritto:
> > 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?
>
> I see your points, and it would surely help the user deciding when to
> suspend and when to poweroff. Nevertheless I don't like this proposal
> because we would have the same menu item with two different actions,
> which is pretty confusing, expecially if the cause of the different
> result is not immediately evident. Also, we would have two different
> dialogs, one with Suspend and one without it (since you don't want
> Suspend if you explicitly asked Power Off...).

The idea is that not a regular "Power Off" dialog is shown, but one for 
this specific case which explains why it is offering a shutdown option, 
something in the lines of:

+-------------------------------------------------------+
| * Power Off? *                                        |
|                                                       |
| You currently have no applications open. Powering the |
| computer off completely would not cost any loss of    |
| data and saves power.                                 |
|                                                       |
|                                [Suspend] [Power Off]  |
+-------------------------------------------------------+

with "Power Off" doing a normal shutdown.

> It is true that your behavior is more akin to what the user wants, than
> what we have today. But with this particular issue, I think we need to
> leave the policy decision completely in the hands of the user (because
> edge cases not covered by design happen to be the majority and not just
> edges).

The only left common use case I could think of is restarting on updates. 
Showing a "Restart" option conditionally for such situations could be a 
solution for that. I wouldn't describe any other use case (such as 
restarting for dual-booting another OS) as "common" in the sense of 
"encouraged work flow".

Regards,
Denis