Re: The good, the bad, the insane

[Rovanion Luckey <rovanion luckey gmail com>]

2011/5/26 Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>

Well, step back and look at the bigger picture. Why does Shell have a
Suspend option and no Power Off option by default (and originally,
before the Alt hack, had no Power Off option *at all*)? The idea was to
influence people in the direction of seeing suspend/resume as the normal
"I'm done for now / Now I'm starting working again" mechanism, much as
it is on phones, which most people rarely turn off. If you expose a
Power Off option with equal weight to the Suspend option, this influence
is lost, and the inertia of current habits will mean people continue to
see Power Off as the 'normal' way to stop using the system, particularly
on desktops...which may mean they don't do it at all, and don't think to
suspend instead. Providing only a Suspend option adjusts the balance of
the decision. I'm 'educated' enough to understand what all the options
are and the implications of each and make a decision - in practice, the
trigger for me switching from 'leave it on' to 'suspend' was a fix for a
bug which made suspending impractical, not the GNOME 3 re-design - but
that's not true of many users.

A very important factor when creating parts for a phone is power effectiveness because of the battery limitation. And because of this phones in suspended mode consume a lot less electricity than computers, simply because they only have one battery to live on.

Making the assumption that most users don't turn off their computers because it's troublesome and therefore only putting in place a suspend button probably does more harm than good considering the people that now won't turn off their computers.

Face the reality that a desktop is not a phone and every thing that has worked successfully on a phone does not work as well on a desktop computer. Suspending phones instead of turning them off makes sense because the phone is a mean of communication that the user always carries with her, something that must always be turned on for the user to be contactable. This is not true for a desktop computer, barely ever even for a laptop computer. 

Hibernate and not Suspend should had been the only option shown in the menu when thinking of the computer as a computer and not a phone. It quickly takes the user back to the state which the computer was when it was hibernated and does not consume a lot of unnecessary energy. But even so, neither suspend nor hibernate works on all computers.


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