Re: The logic behind remove "Restart" and hide "Power Off" in User menu.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le samedi 26 février 2011 à 12:27 -0500, William Jon McCann a écrit :
> It is also worth pointing out that you can't really measure waste in
> absolute terms anyway.  Waste is subjective: it means to use
> carelessly or without value.  I think it is pretty clear that, for
> many, there is value in suspending instead of stopping activities.
> So, we're spending a tiny tiny bit of energy here in the suspend case
> in order that we may save a tremendous amount of energy in others.
> That isn't waste - that is investment.
This reasoning is only true if users care less about power consumption
than about restoring their work. Which in turn supposes :

1) That people will leave their computers on if they can't suspend.
This is yet to be proved, and from a purely environmental point of view,
is determinant. People may as well choose to restore manually their
tasks. This leads us to the second assumption:

2) That people have things to restore
Most of my friends I observe only need to restart e-mail and Web
browser, which is done by session management anyway, and is only one
click away. They close all of their tasks anyway when they're done, even
when they suspend/hibernate (maybe silly, but that's how it is).
Depending on users, suspend may or may not be considered useful.

3) That hibernate doesn't work as well as suspend
Which is of course true in many cases due to hardware, but not always;
often, when hibernate fails, suspend fails too. By hiding this option,
you incite users to use suspend instead of hibernate even when they know
they won't use their computer for the whole night.


> We'll achieve even more impressive power savings when we enable
> suspend on system idleness.  Which for portable systems will result in
> much improved battery run times.  There's that win-win again.
I fully agree, but to me it's absolutely unrelated, if not opposite, to
the decision of hiding the power off/hibernate options. Re-adding just
one item allowing users to run a dialog with those choices doesn't go
against any of your arguments.


You knew this was going to be one of the nicest GNOME 3 flamewars,
didn't you? ;-)