Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: [snip]
That would solve your father's problem, but at the expense of making switching extremely difficult to find. I rather think the item needs to be renamed to express the idea that it's *temporary* switching. "Switch User" is awful, awful wording.
How about "Lock Session/Dual Login"?
In the medium term, the difference between "Sleep" and "Hibernate" should be abolished by letting Sleep suspend to disk *and* to RAM. So if you have power, waking up works quickly; and if you lose power for any reason, waking up still works. (This would also lessen the need to maintain lists of hardware for which the "Sleep" command should or should not be available.)
As long as the user gets clear feedback that they should not turn off the mains power yet. On a related note, how much harm can cutting the power while in the process of hibernating do compared to cutting the power while running normally?
In the long term, the difference between "Sleep" and "Shut Down" could be abolished the same way: the computer could automatically turn itself off once it had been sleeping for a configurable period.
I think the real full shutdown has a particular meaning (ie, the ability to open the case and replace non hotplug hardware). It is probably too dangerous to do this.
-- Tristan Wibberley -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
