GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 697299
suspend action not discoverable on desktop
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:36:59 UTC
If you're on a desktop, the suspend action isn't discoverable unless you have your power button configured to suspend, or a suspend key on your keyboard. The presence of a lid switch, power switch or other key configured to suspend should be detected and if not, the suspend key should be presented in the menu.
Just want to say I like using the alt key to change poweroff to suspend option in the menu (i'm using version 3.6.3), but I would also like to have suspend as an option in the poweroff dialog, that is as well as cancel, restart and poweroff also have suspend. I think this would be very easy to achieve and would make it much easier for those who are not aware of gnome shell keybindings.
This bug is pretty bad. It means that some desktop GNOME users will not able to figure out how to suspend the machine. For those users, the change to hide the "Suspend" menu item was a significant regression.
I've been using GNOME for 12+ years and I thought that there was some hardware problem that meant the suspend button was not present on my desktop machine. There is no conceivable way I would have figured out on my own that I need to press "alt". Happy to provide any hardware details if it would help.
I'll pile on here :-). Closing the lid makes sense on a laptop though I'm sure that comes with its own issues. I can figure out and remember to use the alt key combo. My 75 year old grandma who is used clicking on the user name to suspend her desktop is not so thrilled. How hard is it to add 'suspend' to the power menu? That doesn't add significant clutter and is more intuitive to unsophisticated users IMO.
I've just hit the pain on this trying to update my mother-in-law's laptop. She is used to seeing the suspend option on her desktop, and longs for it to be present on her laptop. She doesn't like relying on closing the lid. She says, "How do I know it's saving power? This idea feels like getting inside the fridge to make sure the light goes out", which made me smile. I agree that this lack of suspend is a bug in the design. Possibly off topic but I see a lot of keyboard-driven features in Gnome 3, which seem to go against some of the GNOME Shell Design Principles https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design/Principles It brings to mind this quote...... "Thinking outside the bubble. The current generation of devs is the first to spend their teenage years with a smartphone. Thumbing a keyboard is deeply natural and intuitive for them. All their peers also have this behaviour, so it also feels normal. But as a result UI development can be happening in a bubble with the rest of us on the outside."
It's been more than a year since this bug was opened, and people like me are still having to come to the bugzilla to figure out how to use their windows managers. The alt thing is completely unintuitive, and the option to suspend exists on Windows 7, so people new to Linux expect it to be there. Anyone who uses their laptop as a desktop replacement wants to be able to close the lid without it turning off for a variety of reasons. For me its the light from the screen while I sleep and have the computer on. I REALLY think that this is a poor choice that will continue to be an issue for as long as it exists. There are just always reasons that people would want to have a suspend (and potentially hibernate, wherever that is) button available. The desktop replacement laptop example given above, along with desktops and tablets all give good examples of use cases where the suspend option is desirable, and checking for those special cases will give you more bug reports like this one whenever a new one pops up. As it stands, the whole alt+shutdown hack is totally undiscoverable, and may as well not exist. I implore you to change it back to being shown by default as it was in 3.4 (or whichever version. I may have that wrong).
I'll follow up with the designers. Thanks.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.