GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 656813
The gnome-shell crash screen prevents users from cleanly terminating applications
Last modified: 2021-06-14 18:23:08 UTC
Whenever the gnome-shell crashes, you get that "Oops"/"Oh no!" screen, where the only thing the user is able to do is [Logout]. (It seems, in 3.2 he might also be able to deactivate extensions there: http://i.imgur.com/ETvfg.png) The problem with that screen is that although the shell crashed, X11 and the user's apps are still running fine and probably contain unsaved data. But that fullscreen crash dialog prevents users from shutting down their apps cleanly before logging out, causing data loss for all applications that don't auto-save. (And for the auto-saving apps, you'd better wait some minutes before logging out now...) It would be much better if that dialog was just a small dialog positioned somewhere where it doesn't overlay the user's apps (bottom-right corner or so).
Maybe a good UI would be to stick to the full-screen dialog but add some kind of minimize button. When pressed, you get back to the desktop (or what's left over) and some logout button is shown at some corner. Then the user can shutdown his apps cleanly (at least on the current desktop) and logout thereafter.
(In reply to comment #1) > Maybe a good UI would be to stick to the full-screen dialog but add some kind > of minimize button. When pressed, you get back to the desktop (or what's left > over) and some logout button is shown at some corner. > > Then the user can shutdown his apps cleanly (at least on the current desktop) > and logout thereafter. When the crash dialog appears, it's only supposed to appear after the Shell has crashed multiple times. So we can't really let the user "shutdown their apps" without a WM running. Maybe we could launch metacity in that case.
> When the crash dialog appears, it's only supposed to appear after the Shell has > crashed multiple times. So we can't really let the user "shutdown their apps" > without a WM running. Maybe we could launch metacity in that case. Most apps have a File menu containing Save/Quit entries and a toolbar with a Save button. That way, a user could at least save his work and terminate his applications on the *current* workspace. Clearly, that's not ideal but better than loosing all his unsaved work.
*** Bug 656706 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #2) [...] > When the crash dialog appears, it's only supposed to appear after the Shell has > crashed multiple times. So we can't really let the user "shutdown their apps" > without a WM running. Maybe we could launch metacity in that case. I'm using metacity as my window manager and I get this error quite regularly because Wine's test suite causes metacity to crash (see bug 693264). Fortunately I discovered that there is actually a way to dismiss the "Oops"/"Oh no!" screen: hold the left 'Windows' key and right-click on the background. This brings up a dialog which overs to minimize the windows. Do that and then, out of sight, out of mind. This leaves me with a fully usable desktop that I routinely still use for days. Of course it still has a window manager (metacity). That suggests that it could make sense to add a 'dismiss without logging me out' button to deal with this sort of situation; or that the code that fires up this "Oops"/"Oh no!" screen should be fixed so it does not needlessly cause users to lose all their data.
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