Re: Suspend & Power Off: A compromise

[Marcel <lists nightsoul org>]

Am 20.08.2011 13:08, schrieb Denis Washington:
> 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

There's still a problem with this. I _always_ have at least Pidgin
running (implies some IRC windows visible), so there would be a need for
a more sophisticated logic for determining if "no application is
running" than just checking for open windows since closing them wouldn't
really "lose current state". Having a whitelist for common IMs could
work for most, but won't for everyone, as always.

Marcel