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

[Marcus Husar <marcus husar googlemail com>]

Hi,

I didn't think this way before. Nevertheless your thoughts are
reasonable. I’ll try to adapt my behaviour to use software suspend
more often.

But people still may have a problem with „holding down a modifier key“
to switch between suspend/shutdown modes. It’s fine with me. I (now)
know that I have to hold down the alt key.

How do you want to teach people to hold down a modifier key, when they
can’t find the shutdown menu item in gnome shell? Without help they
perhaps never will discover this possibility. Everybody wants to
shutdown his/her computer sometimes.

The mockups in https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SystemStopRestart
show a menu item called „Install Updates & Restart...". In my language
(German) it is „Installiere Updates und starte [das System] neu..."
(without „das System“ it sounds odd). That’s quite long and won’t fit
in the menu. I even think it is the wrong place. What about a
notification with an okay button?

What If people want/have to restart their computer manually? They have
to click „Power off..." to restart. That’s quide odd. It’s the same in
Gnome 2.xx (Shutdown -> Restart).

A solution like that would be fine:

normal:
Suspend

holding down modifier key:
Restart
Power off

Regards,
Marcus

2011/2/26 William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Gendre Sebastien <korbe romandie com> wrote:
>> ...
>> And the choice to have Suspend but not Power Off in the User menu
>> encourages them to waste energy.
>
> I'm usually inclined to ignore claims like this that don't provide any
> supporting evidence.  But since you're probably going to keep on
> saying it anyway...
>
> Encouraging the use of suspend will very likely result in a dramatic
> power savings for many people.  If you only have the options: a)
> continue to run at full power b) stop everything you're doing, save
> all your work, close all your apps, lose all your state, wait for the
> system to power off; you have a problem.  In this case, your selfish
> motivations are in opposition to low power consumption.  That's not
> going to turn out well.  And no amount of preaching will change that.
>
> What you need is something that doesn't have to make that trade.
> Maybe something that doesn't force me to abruptly and jarringly
> interrupt my activities and efficiently uses power at the same time.
> Do we have such a thing?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Jon