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Re: Are there plans to add "Reboot" item to the power-cog menu in panel?

 

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Marco Biscaro wrote on 29/02/12 12:23:
> 
> 2012/2/28 Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> ...
>> The shutdown and logout dialogs (and the restart dialog, when it
>> was separate) used to have a 60-second countdown. We dropped it
>> because it is wrong to assume that the computer will shut down or
>> log out by itself once the countdown reaches zero.
> 
> Isn't right to assume that the computer will shutdown when I
> choose "Shutdown" in the power menu?


It would be, but there is no such menu item. Instead, there is "Shut
Down…". An ellipsis is the universal way of saying "you'll need to do
something more before this command is completed".

> Currently this doesn't happen. Mark stated that the confirmation
> dialog is a way to undo a possibly unwanted action.


He didn't say that. A confirmation alert is a method (the crudest
method) of making something harder to do by mistake, when that thing
*can't* easily be undone.

(Auto-saving of documents, and session saving and restoring, would
both have the effect of making accidental shutdown easier to undo. But
the time Ubuntu takes to shut down, and then to start up again, would
always be part of that difficulty of undo.)

> Isn't reasonable to shutdown the computer if I don't undo the
> action before a given timeout?


No, for the reason that you quoted immediately following:

>> After all, the countdown might immediately be followed by one or
>> more alert boxes of the form "Save changes to “Untitled” before
>> closing?" -- alert boxes which are not, and cannot safely be,
>> subject to the same kind of countdown.
> 
> This is a corner case, I think. At least, in my workplace, people
> save everything, close programs and then choose shutdown.
> 
> ...


It doesn't matter whether each case is a corner case, because there
are hundreds of them, and the cost is high for most of them. To give
just four examples, removing the ability for applications to block
session exit could result in people losing hours of unsaved work;
wasting money by downloading 98 percent of an unresumable file over a
metered connection; being misled into thinking photos have been fully
imported off a camera, when they haven't; or turning a DVD-R into a
coaster, by burning only part of it.

- -- 
mpt
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