GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 649281
Shutdown menu item should show up when software updates requiring a reboot have been installed
Last modified: 2012-08-23 16:20:05 UTC
With packagekit or other package/update managers, whenever the user has installed updates that will require a system restart (ex: linux kernel, X server, dbus, kernel modules, etc.), the option to shutdown the system should be un-hidden. We shouldn't require Joe Plumber to figure out the alt-key trick or to logout first before rebooting in this situation.
I think that shutdown should *always* be in the menu. I don't know about you guys, but suspend has never worked for me (perhaps it's the proprietary Nvidia driver), and since I mainly use Linux desktops, I would pretty much never use it anyway. It's useful to have the option to suspend visible all the time (since it's useful for laptops - assuming that suspend works) but shutdown should *also* be there. It's just plain terrible design to hide an option that many users use daily, and for the only way to show it (holding alt/option) to be completely undiscoverable... Mac OS X has separate items (good design), Windows has a drop-down (fine) but Gnome needs what to a new user would be a secret keyboard shortcut to access a common action?
In response to the original report. Yes that was actually in the design for this menu.
Confirming as per latest comment then.
It's also very hard for newcomers. The thing with 'alt' doesn't work especially for people which are not familiar with computers. I tried to explain the concept one of them but she didn't understand it either. And extensions aren't an excuse. Do you think they will enter the adress of the extension website in firefox and install an extension to solve the problem?(shouldn't be aggressive but show that your way of thinking is false) Extensions are something for advanced users.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 677394 ***